“I sing the body electric.” — Walt Whitman
Whitehead derived his metaphysics, in part, from a keen observation and analysis of his own everyday experiences as a human subject. Much of the time we tend to ignore the body, or to take it for granted. But for Whitehead the human body is “the starting point for our knowledge of the circumambient world.” (PR 81)
All sense perception is entirely dependent on the prior functioning of our bodies; what we experience is derived from extensive and interconnected chains of antecedent experiences that occur within the body. We experience other experiences.
For example, what happens when we see a patch of red before us? As Whitehead says, a datum of information is passed from the excited “cells of the retina, through the train of actual entities forming the relevant nerves, up to the brain. Any direct relation of eye to brain is entirely overshadowed by this intensity of indirect transmission . . . the predominant basis of perception is perception of the various bodily organs, as passing on their experiences by channels of transmission and enhancement.” (PR 118, 119) And even this account abstracts from the complexity of the biological details underlying our experience of “red.”
What you are seeing is a presentation made possible by many antecedent processes occurring in your body. From this David Griffin observes: “So even though the data of sensory perception give us a purely spatial world, the process of sensory perception itself suggests that the cells in our bodies are not purely spatial but are prehensive unifications of data from prior events, being in this respect analogous to moments of our own experience.” (RS 106-07)
The body is a vast ocean of feelings—a labyrinth of elegant routes of communication whereby information of various kinds is passed on, amplified, enhanced, integrated, and reintegrated. Whitehead again:
It is a set of occasions miraculously coordinated so as to pour its inheritance into various regions within the brain. There is thus every reason to believe that our sense of unity with the body has the same original as our sense of unity with our immediate past of personal experience. (AI 189)
Your relationship with your body is a social relationship: a relationship of the one self, or soul, to the many micro-individuals that make up your living body—the hundreds of thousands of different kinds of cells whose total number ranges in the trillions. Each cell in turn is a vast society of molecules wherein each molecule in turn is a teeming society of elementary particles. All of these micro-individuals are, to some degree, taking account of one another, or “socializing.” Electrons are very “attracted” to those flirtatious entities we call protons. We are complexly social through and through.
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So closely do we identify with our bodies, that we tend to lose sight of an obvious fact: that the body is in the world. Far from being apart from the external world, the body is only the most intimate part of the environment we experience.
As Whitehead puts it, “We think of ourselves as so intimately entwined in bodily life that a man is a complex unity—body and mind. But the body is part of the external world, continuous with it. In fact, it is just as much part of nature as anything else there—a river, or a mountain, or a cloud. Also, if we are fussily exact, we cannot define where a body begins and where external nature ends.” (MT 21)
Given that our bodies are the most intimate part of nature that we can observe most directly, Whitehead took this as a clue as to what was happening in the rest of nature, and he surmised that “other sections of the universe are to be interpreted in accordance with what we know of the human body.” (PR 119) “The human body,” Whitehead says, “ provides our closest experience of the interplay of the actualities of nature.” (MT 115)
Whitehead calls the body “a miracle of order” and indeed it is the extraordinary structure of the human body that makes possible what may be called high levels of experience. The body, and I mean the body itself, is structured for conceptual adventure. The body is that locus, or matrix, wherein the possible and the actual intersect. On this fundamental contrast is based all novelty.
On this matter of the body, Teilhard de Chardin is in agreement with Whitehead, for he has written:
Hitherto, the prevailing view has been that the body (that is to say, the matter . . . attached to each soul) is a fragment of the universe—a piece completely detached from the rest and handed over to a spirit that informs it. In future, we shall say that the Body is the very Universality of things, in as much as they are centered on an animating Spirit, in as much as they influence that Spirit—and are themselves influenced and sustained by it. . . . My own body is not these cells or those cells that belong exclusively to me: it is what, in these cells and in the rest of the world, feels my influence and reacts against me. My matter is not a part of the universe that I possess totally: it is the totality of the Universe possessed by me partially. (SC 12-13.)
Key to Abbreviations:
PR Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality. Corrected Edition. Ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne.
RS Griffin, David Ray. Religion Without Supernaturalism: A Process Philosophy of Religion.
AI Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas.
MT Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought.
SC Chardin, Teilhard de. Science and Christ.