Symbolism, its meaning and effect · Alfred North Whitehead
CHAPTER I
Thus the disclosure of a contemporary world by presentational immediacy is bound up with the disclosure of the solidarity of actual things by reason of their participation in an impartial system of spatial extension. Beyond this, the knowledge provided by pure presentational immediacy is vivid, precise, and barren. It is also to a large extent controllable at will. I mean that one moment of experience can predetermine to a considerable extent, by inhibitions, or by intensifications, or by other modifications, the characteristics of the presentational immediacy in succeeding moments of experience. This mode of perception, taken purely by itself, is barren, because we may not directly connect the qualitative presentations of other things with any intrinsic characters of those things. We see the image of a coloured chair, presenting to us the space behind a mirror; yet we thereby gain no knowledge concerning any intrinsic characters of spaces behind the mirror. But the image thus seen in a good mirror is just as much an immediate presentation of colour qualifying the world at a distance behind the mirror, as is our direct vision of the chair when we turn round and look at it. Pure presentational immediacy refuses to be divided into delusions and not-delusions.
It is either all of it, or none of it, an immediate presentation of an external contemporary world as in its own right spatial. The sense-data involved in presentational immediacy have a wider relationship in the world than these contemporary things can express. In abstraction from this wider relationship, there is no means of determining the importance of the apparent qualification of contemporary objects by sense-data. For this reason the phrase ‘mere appearance’ carries the suggestion of barrenness. This wider relationship of the sense-data can only be understood by examining the alternative mode of perception, the mode of causal efficacy. But in so far as contemporary things are bound together by mere presentational immediacy, they happen in complete independence except for their spatial relations at the moment. Also for most events, we presume that their intrinsic experience of presentational immediacy is so embryonic as to be negligible. This perceptive mode is important only for a small minority of elaborate organisms. 13. _Objectification._ In this explanation of Presentational Immediacy, I am conforming to the distinction according to which actual things are _objectively_ in our experience and _formally_ existing in their own completeness. I maintain that presentational immediacy is that peculiar way in which contemporary things are ‘objectively’ in our experience, and that among the abstract entities which constitute factors in the mode of introduction are those abstractions usually called sense-data:—for example, colours, sounds, tastes, touches, and bodily feelings.
Thus ‘objectification’ itself is abstraction; since no actual thing is ‘objectified’ in its ‘formal’ completeness. Abstraction expresses nature’s mode of interaction and is not merely mental. When it abstracts, thought is merely conforming to nature—or rather, it is exhibiting itself as an element in nature. Synthesis and analysis require each other. Such a conception is paradoxical if you will persist in thinking of the actual world as a collection of passive actual substances with their private characters or qualities. In that case, it must be nonsense to ask, how one such substance can form a component in the make-up of another such substance. So long as this conception is retained, the difficulty is not relieved by calling each actual substance an event, or a pattern, or an occasion. The difficulty, which arises for such a conception, is to explain how the substances can be actually together in a sense derivative from that in which each individual substance is actual. But the conception of the world here adopted is that of functional activity. By this I mean that every actual thing is something by reason of its activity; whereby its nature consists in its relevance to other things, and its individuality consists in its synthesis of other things so far as they are relevant to it. In enquiring about any one individual we must ask how other individuals enter ‘objectively’ into the unity of its own experience. This unity of its own experience is that individual existing _formally_. We must also enquire how it enters into the ‘formal’ existence of other things; and this entrance is that individual existing _objectively_, that is to say—existing abstractly, exemplifying only some elements in its formal content.
With this conception of the world, in speaking of any actual individual, such as a human being, we must mean that man in one occasion of his experience. Such an occasion, or act, is complex and therefore capable of analysis into phases and other components. It is the most concrete actual entity, and the life of man from birth to death is a historic route of such occasions. These concrete moments 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. The man-at-one-moment concentrates in himself the colour of his own past, and he is the issue of it. The ‘man in his whole life history’ is an abstraction compared to the ‘man in one such moment.’ There are therefore three different meanings for the notion of a particular man,—Julius Cæsar, for example. The word ‘Cæsar’ may mean ‘Cæsar in some one occasion of his existence’: this is the most concrete of all the meanings. The word ‘Cæsar’ may mean ‘the historic route of Cæsar’s life from his Cæsarian birth to his Cæsarian assassination.’ The word ‘Cæsar’ may mean ‘the common form, or pattern, repeated in each occasion of Cæsar’s life.’ You may legitimately choose any one of these meanings; but when you have made your choice, you must in that context stick to it.
This doctrine of the nature of the life-history of an enduring organism holds for all types of organisms, which have attained to unity of experience, for electrons as well as for men. But mankind has gained a richness of experiential content denied to electrons. Whenever the ‘all or none’ principle holds, we are in some way dealing with one actual entity, and not with a society of such entities, nor with the analysis of components contributory to one such entity. This lecture has maintained the doctrine of a direct experience of an external world. It is impossible fully to argue this thesis without getting too far away from my topic. I need only refer you to the first portion of Santayana’s recent book, _Scepticism and Animal Faith_, for a conclusive proof of the futile ‘solipsism of the present moment’—or, in other words, utter scepticism—which results from a denial of this assumption. My second thesis, for which I cannot claim Santayana’s authority, is that, if you consistently maintain such direct individual experience, you will be driven in your philosophical construction to a conception of the world as an interplay of functional activity whereby each concrete individual thing arises from its determinate relativity to the settled world of other concrete individuals, at least so far as the world is past and settled.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.