One of the many surprising adventures of reading Whitehead is to discover what to some may seem an extravagant claim: that much of our received wisdom is not only wrong but that some of our most venerated thinkers got it exactly backwards. Whitehead reminds us that “the doctrines which best repay critical examination are those which for the longest period have remained unquestioned.” In Process and Reality, time and time again he will cite an established idea only to say, “but the converse is true.”
By my count, Whitehead uses this strategy, or some variation thereof, no fewer than 26 times in Process and Reality. This idea of converse is related, on a formal level, to the idea of reverse that defines a chiasmus, and thus ties in with the list of chiasmi in PR that I posted earlier.
Here, then, is the list of Whitehead’s variations on the “Converse” strategy in Process and Reality, followed by the page number:
The contrary doctrine is that an actual entity never changes, and that it is the outcome of whatever can be ascribed to it in the way of quality or relationship. 79
The organic doctrine is closer to Descartes than to Newton. Also it is close to Spinoza; but Spinoza bases his philosophy upon the monistic substance, of which the actual occasions are inferior modes. The philosophy of organism inverts this point of view. 81
The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason describes the process by which subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world. The philosophy of organism seeks to describe how objective data pass into subjective satisfaction, and how order in the objective data provides intensity in the subjective satisfaction. For Kant, the world emerges from the subject; for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world—a ‘superject’ rather than a ‘subject.’ 88
It is the accepted doctrine in physical science that a living body is to be interpreted according to what is known of other sections of the physical universe. This is a sound axiom; but it is double-edged. For it carries with it the converse deduction that other sections of the universe are to be interpreted in accordance with what we know of the human body. 119
The ‘classical’ theory of time tacitly assumed that a duration included the directly perceived immediate present of each one of its members. The converse proposition certainly follows from the account given above, that the immediate present of each actual occasion lies in a duration. 125
These various aspects can be summed up in the statement that experience involves a becoming, that becoming means that something becomes, and that what becomes involves repetition transformed into novel immediacy. This statement directly traverses one main presupposition which Descartes and Hume agree in stating explicitly. This presupposition is that of the individual independence of successive temporal occasions. 136-37
This separation asserts Kant’s principle: “Gedanken ohne Inhalt sind leer, Anschauungen ohne Begriffe sind blind.” But Kant’s principle is here applied in exactly the converse way to Kant’s own use of it. Kant is obsessed with the mentality of ‘intuition,’ and hence with its necessary involution in consciousness. His suppressed premise is ‘Intuitions are never blind.’ 139
Hume and Locke, with the overintellectualist bias prevalent among philosophers, assume that emotional feelings are necessarily derivative from sensations. This is conspicuously not the case; the correlation between such feelings and sensations is on the whole a secondary effect. Emotions conspicuously brush aside sensations and fasten upon the ‘particular’ objects to which—in Locke’s phrase—certain ‘ideas’ are ‘determined.’ The confinement of our prehension of other actual entities to the mediation of private sensations is pure myth. The converse doctrine is nearer the truth: the more primitive mode of objectification is via emotional tone, and only in exceptional organisms does objectification, via sensation, supervene with any effectiveness. In their doctrine on this point, Locke and Hume were probably only repeating the mediaeval tradition, and they have passed on the tradition to their successors. 141
If we consider the matter physiologically, the emotional tone depends mainly on the condition of the viscera which are peculiarly ineffective in generating sensations. Thus the whole notion of prehension should be inverted. We prehend other actual entities more primitively by direct mediation of emotional tone, and only secondarily and waveringly by direct mediation of sense. 141
Descartes in his own philosophy conceives the thinker as creating the occasional thought. The philosophy of organism inverts the order, and conceives the thought as a constituent operation in the creation of the occasional 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 operations of an organism are directed towards the organism as a ‘superject,’ and are not directed from the organism as a ‘subject.’ 151
10 [subtotal to this point]
Thus for Kant the process whereby there is experience is a process from subjectivity to apparent objectivity. The philosophy of organism inverts this analysis, and explains the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity, namely, from the objectivity, whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity, whereby there is one individual experience. 156
This is the famous subjectivist bias which entered into modern philosophy through Descartes. In this doctrine Descartes undoubtedly made the greatest philosophical discovery since the age of Plato and Aristotle. For his doctrine directly traversed the notion that the proposition, ‘This stone is grey,’ expresses a primary form of known fact from which metaphysics can start its generalizations. If we are to go back to the subjective enjoyment of experience, the type of primary starting-point is ‘my perception of this stone as grey.’ 159
The discussion of the problem constituted by the connection between causation and perception has been conducted by the various schools of thought derived from Hume and Kant under the misapprehension generated by an inversion of the true constitution of experience. The inversion was explicit in the writings of Hume and of Kant: for both of them presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, and any apprehension of causation was, somehow or other, to be elicited from this primary fact. 173
It must be remembered that clearness in consciousness is no evidence for primitiveness in the genetic process: the opposite doctrine is more nearly true. 173
The man himself will have no doubt of it. In fact, it is the feeling of causality which enables the man to distinguish the priority of the flash; and the inversion of the argument, whereby the temporal sequence ‘flash to blink’ is made the premise for the ‘causality’ belief, has its origin in pure theory. 175
It would seem therefore that inhibitions of sensa, given in presentational immediacy, should be accompanied by a corresponding absence of ‘causal feeling’; for the explanation of how there is ‘causal feeling’ presupposes the well-marked familiar sensa, in presentational immediacy. Unfortunately the contrary is the case. An inhibition of familiar sensa is very apt to leave us a prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelms us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague things around us. 176
Our bodily experience is primarily an experience of the dependence of presentational immediacy upon causal efficacy. Hume’s doctrine inverts this relationship by making causal efficacy, as an experience, dependent upon presentational immediacy. This doctrine, whatever be its merits, is not based upon any appeal to experience. 176
One reason for the philosophical difficulties over causation is that Hume, and subsequently Kant, conceived the causal nexus as, in its primary character, derived from the presupposed sequence of immediate presentations. But if we interrogate experience, the exact converse is the case; the perceptive mode of immediate presentation affords information about the percepta in the more aboriginal mode of causal efficacy. 178
But we do not usually think of the things as symbolizing the words correlated to them. This failure to invert our ideas arises from the most useful aspect of symbolism. 182-83
In the philosophy of organism, an actual occasion—as has been stated above—is the whole universe in process of attainment of a particular satisfaction. Bradley’s doctrine of actuality is simply inverted. 200
20 [subtotal to this point]
In the philosophy of organism the nexus, which is the basis for such direct apprehension, is provided by the physical feelings. The philosophy of organism here takes the opposite road to that taken alike by Descartes and by Kant. Both of these philosophers accepted (Descartes with hesitations, and Kant without question) the traditional subjectivist sensationalism, and assigned the intuition of ‘things without’ peculiarly to the intelligence. 242
This genetic passage from phase to phase is not in physical time: the exactly converse point of view expresses the relationship of concrescence to physical time. 283
There is no reason to assimilate the conditions for hybrid prehensions to those for pure physical prehensions. Indeed the contrary hypothesis is the more natural. 308
We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions, and within actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to organism, as the basic idea of physical science. 309
Hume’s theory of a complex of such impressions elaborated into a supposition of a common physical world is entirely contrary to naive experience. We find ourselves in the double role of agents and patients in a common world, and the conscious recognition of impressions of sensation is the work of sophisticated elaboration. 315
A young man does not initiate his experience by dancing with impressions of sensation, and then proceed to conjecture a partner. His experience takes the converse route. 315-16
Total: 26
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I’ll end this post with an example of the “converse” theme that I recently found in another Whitehead book:
The doctrine is founded upon three metaphysical principles. One principle is that the very essence of real actuality—that is, of the completely real—is process. Thus each actual thing is only to be understood in terms of its becoming and perishing. There is no halt in which the actuality is just its static self, accidentally played upon by qualifications derived from the shift of circumstances. The converse is the truth.
Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, pp. 274-75.
HyC