NOTES ON WHITEHEAD PT. 3

I continue making slow progress through PROCESS AND REALITY. As I said previously, the philosopher throws at his readers a huge quantity of specialized terms. I feel a mild kinship with Whitehead, given I too am given to breaking down the blooming, buzzing world into dozens of specialized categories. Because of that, I’m aware that this blog is probably hard going for any neophyte readers. Still, with a blog it’s possible for a blog-reader to trace a given term back to its first usage, as long as the author provides the proper pathways. I’m over halfway through Whitehead’s book and I have no clue as to what his term “prehension” means, except that it’s certainly derived from the English “apprehension.”

Part 3 may eventually provide some insights, since it sports the title “Theory of Prehensions,” but I’m more interested in his opening chapter, “The Theory of Feelings.” As I understand Whitehead, his process theory strikes down the long-established dichotomy between “objective” and “subjective.” Subjective feelings arise from objective causes, and thus participate in those causal nexuses, as opposed to the dominant view that any subjective feelings are epiphenomenal to the primary phenomenon. From Section 1 of Chopter 2:

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… Therefore simple physical feelings will also be called “causal” feelings.”

Without worrying about Whitehead’s precise connotations, I’ll point out that Schopenhauer also wrote his own account of a form of “simple feeling,” which at one point he called “the percept.” These feelings, he specified, were the sort that both reasoning humans and reason-less animals had in common. Reasoning humans alone, however, were capable of thinking in terms of the form Schopenhauer called “the concept.” I have yet to see Whitehead write anything about Schopenhauer, though presumably the gloomy philosopher would be as irrelevant to process philosophy as Kant is said to be. Yet there may be at least a rough parallel between Schopenhauer’s terms and the categories Whitehead describes as the twofold aspect of concrescence:

In each concrescence there is a twofold aspect of the creative urge. In one aspect there is the origination of simple causal feelings; and in the other aspect there is the origination of conceptual feelings.

On the same page Whitehead defines conceptual feeling:

A conceptual feeling is feeling an eternal object in the primary metaphysical character of being an “object,” that is to say, feeling its capacity for being a realized determinant of process.

I think I follow Whitehead’s general thrust, but as I stated earlier, I’m just that not interested in the philosopher’s ontology. I do find appealing his general defiance of the object-subject dichotomy, in that “feelings” are not mere abstractions, given that they arise, as modern science tells us, from the neural pathways of the brain. I have more investment in the ways in which Carl Jung extended the insights of Kant and Schopenhauer into Jungian psychology (which, for what it’s worth, is roughly contemporaneous with Whitehead’s process philosophy). And thus, inaccurate as it may be to the spirit of Whitehead, I tend to translate his idea of “simple feelings” and “conceptual feelings” into a schema like that of Jung’s “feelings” and “intuition.”

Thanks to Jung’s schema, I evolved my theory of how narrative functions on two levels, that of the “lateral meaning” and the “vertical meaning.” To the extent that Whitehead’s concepts can be loosely translated into my Jungian-influenced ones, then “lateral meaning,” composed of Jung’s “sensation” and “feeling,” compares somewhat with “causal feeling,” while “vertical meaning,” summed up by the “thinking” and “intuition” functions, would roughly line up with “conceptual feeling.” Obviously, though, I like Jung’s terms better, since they allow for greater specificity. Whether or not Whitehead would consider Jung tainted by the dominant “objective-subjective” dichotomy is anyone’s guess.