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.
No comments:
Post a Comment