What do we encounter when we perceive?

Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 06 · Enduring things, perception and judgment

Imagine the blue cup standing under a lamp. Its rim is sharply outlined against the table, and even the small chip is easy to see. Your arm, tired from carrying shopping, is harder to describe: there is a heaviness in reaching, a sense of effort inherited from something already done. The blue has a definite place; the effort is more diffuse, though it matters to what you do.

Does the clearer appearance tell us everything that experience receives? Whitehead thinks that an account beginning with distinct colors, sounds and shapes has already left something out: our sense of being affected by a world in which we are involved.

The last lesson asked what sustains a thing. This one asks how a thing enters experience: as a display of qualities, as something affecting us and as an identified source of those effects. Whitehead answers by distinguishing two modes of perception and the fallible way they are integrated. The opening scene involves many occasions; it is not an observation of one. [7]

The appearance and the influence

Whitehead calls the distinct display of qualities in spatial relations presentational immediacy. A patch of blue appears here, beside the pale surface of the table, and its shape, location and contrast can be told apart. This mode supplies a presented arrangement. Considered by itself, it does not tell us what history produced that arrangement or what the thing displayed will do next. [1]

The word immediacy concerns how something is presented; it does not mean that nothing makes the presentation possible. Nor is this mode restricted to eyesight. A distinct sound, a localized temperature or the apparent shape of a surface we touch can also belong to it. Spatial relations have their ordinary, provisional meaning here: here and there, beside, nearer and farther, with the perceiver’s body as a point of reference. Lesson 08 will ask what makes such an extensive world possible, but we need no geometry to recognize the present distinction.

Causal efficacy is perception of the achieved world through its contribution to a new experience. Efficacy means making a difference: the past is felt in what it imposes, enables or modifies, and its sources and details may remain obscure even when their influence is insistent. The tiredness that carries into your next movement offers an ordinary way into the question. An earlier bodily history matters to the present effort without having to be recalled as a sequence of clear appearances. Whitehead takes this experienced dependence to disclose a basic relation of inheritance; whether it warrants that further claim will be our central objection. [2]

Causal efficacy is not simply another name for touch. Being affected enters seeing and hearing too, while a neatly localized sensation of touch can belong to presentational immediacy. The distinction concerns what a mode contributes: a displayed quality and arrangement, or the efficacy of what is received. One sensory episode can involve both.

Lesson 03’s account of physical feeling supplies the underlying relation. In the temporal case, an earlier occasion is the initial datum, and one of its feelings supplies the objective datum through which it enters a new subject; the new feeling has its own subjective form. Receiving that contribution gives the finished past a role in a different subject’s becoming. [3]

Whitehead treats this as primitive perception, without consciousness; consciously noticing that something has a cause is a more developed activity. A human report of tiredness cannot isolate one simple physical feeling, but his theory places the reported experience within a complex inheritance of such feelings. The contribution can be real without being separately recognizable.

Receiving in this sense helps constitute the subject. It is neither delivery into a finished container nor the assembly of independently finished prehensions, and Creativity adds no agent behind it. These qualifications from earlier lessons keep the language of perception from returning us to a wholly separate observer who afterward lets the world in.

Why the body matters

The color appears at the cup, yet the conditions through which it appears include the body. Whitehead describes a route of inheritance through the environment and the organs involved in perception. What is received at one point has already been shaped by earlier relations, and by the time the color is distinctly displayed, much of that history may be quite unobtrusive. [1]

His point is not that we ordinarily inspect this route; we can see without seeing how we see. The route belongs, rather, to the explanation of why this appearance occurs and why changes in bodily conditions can change it. The cup’s visible location must be distinguished from the bodily mediation of its appearance. And calling the body a society does not turn all its members into one experiencing subject; lesson 05’s distinction still holds.

John Cobb’s account of perception emphasizes this mediation and the difference between receiving an influence and locating a color as there now. He uses neural pathways to explain the idea, but we can keep the philosophical distinction without treating those details, or Whitehead’s own sensory physiology, as established neuroscience. Neither a neuron firing nor the complete act of seeing has thereby been identified as one occasion. [5]

For Whitehead, presentational immediacy develops from the datum received through causal efficacy. A feeling already carries a qualitative character and relations to the body and its surroundings. As a clear display develops, certain qualities and spatial relations acquire greater importance, and the appearance can become precise in respects that were barely distinguished in the inheritance. That is a change of relevance within experience. It is not evidence that the clear appearance was experience’s unconditioned beginning. [1]

Whitehead sometimes describes sensation as projected, but he warns that the word can mislead: there were never wholly placeless sensations waiting to be thrown onto a separate screen. The two modes express the same datum with different emphases. How a clear display is constituted and how it is used to interpret the world are distinguishable parts of the account.

The order of explanation also differs from clock time. Calling presentational immediacy derivative does not identify two successive measured intervals inside one occasion: the genetic distinctions concern dependence within its becoming. Our human account of looking, turning and looking again involves many occasions, and their own becoming and perishing should not be confused with that sequence of activities. [7]

What allows the modes to meet?

How can a displayed place and a felt influence be connected? Whitehead calls their point of connection a common ground: a region or qualitative form that figures in both modes, with different prominence and associated feelings. Without something shared, the display would give us no reason to locate this influence here. The connection makes interpretation possible, but it cannot guarantee that the interpretation is right. [1]

One common ground is a region, and here the body is especially important. Whitehead distinguishes a localized sensation of eye-strain from the experience of the eye’s efficacy in seeing. The strain’s location helps make the bodily region definite; the feeling of efficacy gives that region a role in vision. Their correlation brings a clearly presented place together with a contributing part of the body. Eye-strain on its own would no more explain sight than an aching foot at the same moment would.

A second common ground is a qualitative form, an eternal object in the terminology of lesson 04. The shade felt through the eye can also characterize a region seen at a distance. The eye need not itself appear blue; the claim concerns the quality contributed through that bodily route and its role in the display. Here the form is common while the regions differ. Spatial relations in the inheritance help determine where the quality is displayed, but the apparent location can still misidentify the thing responsible.

This integration is symbolic reference: a percept in one mode evokes a percept in the other and helps determine its significance. What is clearly displayed can give apparent location and character to what is felt as affecting us, and the felt influence can give the display urgency and practical importance. Ordinarily we meet a cup we can lift, a surface that will resist us or a passage we can enter; we do not usually begin with a detached inventory of colors and then consciously attach every meaning. [2]

Elizabeth Kraus helps connect this account with lesson 04. Physical feeling receives actuality, and conceptual feeling concerns potential forms and their valuation; through their interplay, a received quality can gain a different place and importance in a developed appearance. Neither mode of perception is a separate faculty. In particular, we must not assign causal efficacy to a physical faculty and presentational immediacy to a conceptual one: the clear display itself depends on both kinds of feeling, and conceptual feeling need not be conscious. [6]

Seeing something as a thing

Whitehead’s own example is a gray stone. The gray region is distinctly presented, but calling it a stone involves more: the appearance is taken to disclose something with a history and with powers relevant to what happens next. The enduring thing of lesson 05 has entered our perception through an interpretation of the display. [1] [2]

In his account, the received causal influences come from the settled past, while the displayed stone appears present. To identify the appearance with the continuing stone is to assume that the relevant history has continued into that region. Lesson 05 required an actual route of inheritance to distinguish endurance from mere resemblance, and that distinction now returns as a limit on perception: a clear gray shape does not by itself establish which enduring history continues there.

This is where error becomes possible. A theatrical lighting effect might give a region the appearance of stone without the expected solid body being there. The displayed gray need not have been invented by a conscious decision; the mistake can already lie in the bodily integration through which this appearance is felt as that enduring, resistant thing. Whitehead explicitly denies that all such error originates in conscious judgment. [2]

He describes the two pure modes as incapable of error while allowing their symbolic integration to fail. In his analysis the gray as presented is an ingredient of experience, and causal reception is the actual contribution received; neither ingredient by itself identifies the presented region as the continuation of this particular stone. It is that identification which introduces the vulnerable correlation. The claim gives no immunity to a human report about what was seen or what caused it: ordinary perception is already mixed, and describing it requires further interpretation.

Error therefore need not make the whole world a fiction. An appearance produced through lighting and bodily conditions still has a causal history; what fails is the identification of that history with the particular thing supposedly displayed. Recognizing the mistake replaces one account of what is affecting us with another. It does not show that nothing has affected us. [5]

Symbolic reference is useful for the same reason it is risky. A distinct appearance gives us something to approach, avoid or examine, where an undifferentiated sense of influence would offer little guidance, but the apparent match can be wrong. Further perception and action can expose the failure: the surface does not resist as expected, or a changed viewpoint reveals the lighting arrangement.

Whitehead calls such checking pragmatic, because consequences matter. The expectation carried by a symbolic reference can meet further perception, as when the anticipated resistance is compared with what the body encounters, and agreement or conflict then bears on that particular interpretation. That is different from asking whether the experience happened to have a favorable result. Whitehead also warns against reducing truth to usefulness: a check must eventually reach a definite comparison rather than postponing every decision to a future benefit. The developed account of judgment remains the next lesson’s question. [4]

Does feeling dependence establish the theory?

Whitehead gives causal efficacy priority: presentational immediacy develops from it, while much causal reception occurs without a distinct display or conscious analysis. Why accept that direction of explanation?

His argument challenges the assumption that what is clearest in consciousness must also be most basic in experience. On his reading of Hume and Kant, a world of distinct presentations comes first, and causal connection must somehow be recovered from it. These are Whitehead’s interpretations of those philosophers, not independently settled accounts of their work, and we can consider the philosophical issue without deciding whether they are historically accurate. [2]

He first appeals to an ordinary response: a person blinks when a light flashes. A list of the flash, the movement of the eyelid and the darkness, he argues, leaves out the felt compulsion of the response. And if that compulsion is explained as a feeling of habit, he asks why habit may be felt while causal efficacy may not. Merely having a habit of experiencing one presentation after another does not yet explain experiencing the dependence. The challenge is to hold both explanations to the same standard of admissible experience.

Next he considers experiences in which definite sensory presentations fade: darkness, quiet, the approach of sleep. The sense of being subject to surrounding influences may remain there, or even become more prominent. He also points to bodily mediation: we experience seeing through our eyes and touching through our hands, rather than first meeting isolated qualities from nowhere. These considerations are meant to undermine an account that derives every sense of dependence from repeated clear displays. [2]

His conclusion requires further premises. The felt dependence must disclose something of the world’s contribution, not merely a feeling to which a cause is afterward attributed. The history through which the body supplies appearances must belong to the constitution of experience. And the relation discovered in these cases must legitimately guide an account of more basic actuality. Whitehead’s appeal to less complex organisms extends the argument, but it does not turn those premises into observed facts about the feelings of plants or particles.

A critic can accept that people feel affected and still question what the feeling establishes. An experience of compulsion does not by itself identify another occasion or demonstrate that one feeling has entered the constitution of another. Nor does a sense of surrounding influence in darkness rule out memory, expectation or bodily habit as explanations. Perhaps the theory teaches its reader to experience its categories as though they were the evidence for it.

A reply on Whitehead’s behalf should compare the two proposed orders of explanation. An account that begins with isolated appearances must show how their succession yields experienced dependence; his account begins with inherited influence and asks how bodily integration gives some of it a clearer display. The persistence of a sense of influence while distinct appearances fade favors his order, he argues, but it does not conclusively exclude the critic’s alternatives. What he claims to gain is a connected explanation of dependence, mediation and appearance. What he still owes is a justification of the experiential interpretation of causal inheritance, rather than treating that interpretation as already given in every report of feeling affected. [7]

From an appearance to a word

Language extends this account of symbolism. Hearing someone say “cup” can make a familiar object, an expectation of tea or a remembered accident relevant. The sound and what it evokes play different roles: the word need not resemble a cup, and the cup need not be present for the word to affect experience. [4]

The direction can also reverse, as when seeing the cup brings its name to mind. Whitehead’s terms symbol and meaning name roles in a particular reference, not two permanently separate kinds of thing. A sound is convenient because we can reproduce it more readily than we can bring the thing or event before us, though its usefulness does not guarantee that another listener will find the same meaning in it.

A world encountered through symbols is not, for that reason, a world made only of symbols: something that serves as a symbol can also have its own actuality and causal effects. Cobb stresses this limit. Interpreting the cup’s appearance neither creates the cup nor makes every interpretation of it correct. And what we take an appearance or a word to mean can in turn become something we consider and assess, a further question that leads toward judgment. [5]

Try the bright rectangle

Imagine that Petra enters a dim corridor. Ahead of her, a bright rectangular patch appears within a dark frame, and at the same moment she feels a cool current against her wrist. The rectangle immediately looks like an open doorway letting in air, and she turns toward it without pausing to reason out that interpretation.

Then she stops to inspect it. Suppose that the frame holds a closed glass panel reflecting a lamp elsewhere in the corridor, and that the cool air comes from a ventilation grille beside her. The reflection and the draft are real features of the stipulated scene; their apparent connection was misleading.

Distinguish what is displayed, what is received as causal influence and what Petra takes the display to mean. Where does the interpretation go wrong, and what can further checking correct? Explain why it would be misleading to assign touch wholly to causal efficacy and sight wholly to presentational immediacy. Identify which details are analogical and why this sequence cannot identify one actual occasion. Finally, connect inheritance, relevant forms and enduring things to this perception, then state one reason a critic could remain unconvinced by Whitehead’s explanation.

A possible response

What is displayed includes the brightness, the rectangular outline and the apparent position within a frame. A distinctly localized cool quality at the wrist also belongs on the side of sensory presentation, which is why it would be misleading to assign touch wholly to causal efficacy and sight wholly to presentational immediacy. Merely dividing the scene into seeing and touching would miss Whitehead’s distinction: seeing and feeling the current both involve bodily mediation and a causal history, and either can have distinctly presented qualities.

Causal influence is received in Petra’s being affected before she investigates: her body is involved both in the occurrence of the visual appearance and in the impact felt at her wrist. In Whitehead’s terms, this experience derives from an achieved world whose contributions are not all distinctly recognized. To say that the grille caused the draft already goes beyond this vague reception to an identification of its source. The exercise stipulates that source for us; it does not say that Petra immediately and infallibly perceived it as such.

What Petra takes the display to mean is an open doorway letting in air, an interpretation that combines the bright framed region with the felt current. The interpretation goes wrong in that combination and localization. Under the later stipulations, the lamp’s reflection accounts for the bright region and the nearby ventilation accounts for the draft; neither the visual appearance nor the felt influence has to be dismissed as nothing. Their actual histories differ from the continuation Petra first attributed to the apparent doorway.

Further checking can correct that interpretation. Petra might change her viewpoint to examine the reflection, cautiously inspect the glass and find where the current is strongest. Such actions add experience against which the original interpretation can be assessed, though they do not place her outside every possibility of error. A practical success, such as finding somewhere to cool down, would also be different from showing that the panel was an open door. The stipulated answer lets us separate those questions without claiming a universal test that cannot fail.

This is a human-scale analogy involving many occasions. Petra, the panel, the draft and each act of looking cannot be assigned one-for-one to metaphysical occasions or feelings. The initial datum of a simple physical feeling would be an earlier actuality, and the objective datum the feeling through which it was objectified for a new subject; the whole corridor is not one such datum. Nor are entering, turning and checking the measured genetic phases of a single becoming. The later inspection is a new situation with further inherited conditions.

The scene connects the preceding lessons without making them interchangeable. Inheritance supplies the achieved conditions of perception. A rectangular form, considered apart from an instance, illustrates a potential, while the particular doorway interpretation also involves actual things and their relations, so it is not simply one eternal object. Received forms acquire a new relevance in an integrated experience, which leaves room for a new interpretation without making it true. Enduring structures such as the panel and the ventilation apparatus depend, on lesson 05’s account, on sustained inherited organization, and their persistence gives neither structure a single mind. Symbolic reference brings appearance and influence together as something Petra can respond to before an explicit judgment.

A critic could grant this distinction between reception and attribution while doubting that causal influence must consist in the transmission of feeling between actualities. Or the critic could ask how Whitehead establishes the priority of causal efficacy without already assuming the theory. A strong response reconstructs the appeal to felt dependence, bodily mediation and the limits of isolated appearances, then identifies the further premise it accepts or disputes; agreement is not required. Nor does the discovery of an error prove that the world is a fiction, or that a new interpretation is morally better simply because it is new.

What we encounter and what we conclude

We began with a clear rim and an obscure bodily effort, and Whitehead asks us to understand both as aspects of an encounter whose conditions are only partly displayed. Symbolic integration lets the displayed cup matter as something with a history and powers, but it also lets us attribute an influence to the wrong source. An account of perception must make room for both.

Being struck by an interpretation, however, is different from having grounds to accept it. We can consider how something might be even when it is not that way. How can such a possibility matter, and what distinguishes its interest from its truth? The next lesson takes up that question and brings this middle stage to its close.

Sources and limits

[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978; supplied EPUB identifying the first Free Press paperback edition, 1985), complete II.VIII §§I–II (Part II, chapter VIII, sections I–II), M255–263, for the common ground of the two modes, bodily mediation, the shared datum and the stone example. The complete chapter, §§I–VI, M255–279, with its author note and relevant editorial notes, governs this account. M means the original Macmillan pages, retained in brackets, not the corrected edition’s printed pages.

[2] Whitehead, complete II.VIII §§III–V, M263–274, for his case for the priority of causal efficacy: section III develops the flash-and-blink argument; section IV appeals to dimmer sensory experience and bodily dependence; section V distinguishes bodily symbolic integration and its error from conscious judgment. His accounts of Hume and Kant are attributed arguments, and his extension to lower organisms is not established biology. The spatial account here remains introductory.

[3] Whitehead, complete III.II §I, M361–365, and III.I §III, M338–340, for primitive nonconscious perception, mediation, the distinction between initial and objective datum and the subject’s constitution through feelings. The actual-entity qualification from lesson 02 remains: the broader term includes God, whose status is not simply that of a perishing temporal occasion. Editors’ Note 31.16 records the uneven terminology.

[4] Whitehead, complete II.VIII §VI, M274–279, for symbolism in language. The section extends symbolism to language, allows the direction of reference to reverse, distinguishes practical fortune from rightness and qualifies the reduction of truth to usefulness. The lesson uses that distinction without undertaking the developed account of propositions and judgment.

[5] John B. Cobb Jr., Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (P&F Press, supplied 2008 edition), complete entries “Perception in the Modes of Causal Efficacy and Presentational Immediacy,” pp. 53–55; “Symbolic Reference,” p. 55; and “The Subjectivist Principle and the Reformed Subjectivist Principle,” p. 56, for his exposition of perceptual mediation and its limits. Cobb’s exposition centers on conscious perception; Whitehead’s II.VIII governs the broader claim that symbolic integration and error need not originate in conscious judgment. Cobb’s rejection of a merely symbolic world does not make Whitehead’s actualities nonexperiential substances. Scientific and sweeping historical comparisons are not adopted as findings.

[6] Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, supplied second edition (Fordham University Press, 1998; electronic edition 2018), complete chapter 5 §III, “The Primary Feelings,” with relevant chapter notes 5–7 and the qualification in note 8, for the distinction between physical reception and conceptual valuation, drawn without introducing independent faculties. Her qualified interpretation of negative physical prehensions preserves the difference between initial reception and derived exclusions; it is not a license to delete the settled past. Her fuller account of perception in chapter 4 and the complete classification of feelings are not developed here. EPUB locators: text/part0015.html#ch5_sec3 and #ch5-fn8; this copy has no reliable printed-page markers.

[7] The cup opening, the corridor exercise, the full response and the organization of the critical comparison are original teaching material. Human perceptual situations involve many occasions and supply no experimental proof or identification of one. The earlier qualifications remain: experience is broader than consciousness, genetic becoming differs from measured succession, and a society does not automatically have one mind. Intensity, satisfaction and novelty imply neither moral improvement nor a proof of human freedom or quantum indeterminacy. The inherited difficulties about causal feeling, divine valuation and self-determination remain open.