Perspectival realism and primary-secondary-tertiary qualities
The distinction between primary and secondary qualities begins in earnest during the early modern period. John Locke develops the most sustained account, introducing an additional wrinkle with tertiary qualities. Locke’s analysis initiates Whitehead’s reworking of this distinction, a reworking so radical that it is in effect a redefinition.
Definitions of the primary-secondary distinction are built around opposition between perceiving subject and object of perception. Primary qualities (length, width, weight, and so on) are not relative to perceiver. Secondary qualities (scent, taste, colour or sound) are. Tertiary qualities supervene on the primary or secondary, with economic values or aesthetic qualities given as examples. (As we will see, Locke’s original presentation does not exactly follow this.) Such definitions incorporate constitutive assumptions of the ‘bifurcation of nature’. The bifurcation as operation produces the distinction, but once posited, the distinction structures attention to reinforce the operation.
Such distinctions do capture pervasive experience of phenomenal variability. The well-known eye-of-the-beholder’s variability of taste cannot be denied. But when the pervasiveness of this experience is explained through the bifurcation, we move from descriptive phenomenological distinctions to implicit (or explicit) claims about metaphysical cause. The epistemic and ontological status of the qualities then appear in order of decreasing priority: Primary qualities are the most reliable because they give us access to how the object ‘really is’; secondary qualities are less reliable, since, as relational features, they are subject to variability – from striking examples such as colour-blindness to variation in perception of heat, and so on. They however still have some metaphysical status in referring to real outcomes of interaction between a perceiver’s sense organs and some (presumably physical) qualities: while the ‘sound’ the vibrations of air make in striking the ear require the ear for their existence, the vibrations that cause these sounds do not. Finally, tertiary qualities lack almost all epistemic and metaphysical standing, due to their constitutive variability. They are relegated to the epiphenomenal, psychological or subjective.
These are, in cursory form, constitutive commitments of most ‘realisms’ where the existence of a mind-independent reality is reliably demonstrated by primary qualities.1 Like the bifurcation, a mark of their entrenchment is the extent to which they appear as more or less common sense, albeit in a ‘pre-critical’ or ‘naïve’ sense.2 Nevertheless, for all this quasi-intuitive plausibility, it is no secret that, since Kant, if not Berkeley, philosophical thought has not accepted the obviousness of the metaphysical cause of such distinctions. Kant famously denies direct access to the Ding an sich and thus, in some sense, even primary qualities remain mind-dependent. Berkeley also challenges the ease with which primary qualities are ascribed to a mind-independent matter where secondary qualities remain relative. The issue, for Berkeley, is the extent to which the separation of these two kinds of ideas is an operation of abstraction:
but I desire any one to reflect and try whether he can, by any abstraction of thought, conceive the extension and motion of a body without other sensible qualities . . . the tenet of extended movable substances existing without the mind depends on the strange doctrine of abstract [general] ideas. (2003 [1710]: 35)
Complicating, challenging or affirming the primary-secondary distinction is at the heart of Western philosophy since the early moderns, from neo-Cartesian materialisms to transcendental or subjective idealisms (including contemporary phenomenological versions).
This is why Quentin Meillassoux identifies ‘correlationism’ as ‘the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant’ (Meillassoux 2008: 5). Correlationism names ‘the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other’ (2008: 5). Inherent to correlationism is a critique of dualisms that Meillassoux dubs the ‘correlationist two-step’. Not only is access to being-in-itself not possible without thought, but subject and object cannot be extricated from one another. The ‘correlationist two-step’ consists in the purported ‘primacy of the relation over the related terms; a belief in the constitutive power of reciprocal relation’ (2008: 5, emphasis added). Meillassoux’s ‘correlationism’ divides philosophy and the empirical sciences, since claims about the world as it is, independent of thought, are considered naïve or reductive by the ‘correlationist’.
While Meillassoux’s way of setting up this problem is not without important implications, the extent to which he accepts inherited definitions of its operative terms is striking. Rather than question how the primary and secondary distinction is produced, Meillassoux declares that ‘It is time [the theory of primary and secondary qualities] was rehabilitated’ (2008: 1). His interest is in a realism that can make sense of what he calls ‘ancestrality’: empirical claims about the dating of events prior to origin of any life on Earth, but especially human life.3 Such claims in astrophysics, geology and astrobiology challenge the ‘correlationist two-step’ by making claims about reality prior to the possibility of its given-ness to (human) thought: ‘from the perspective of the correlationist . . . ancestral statements [cannot be] . . . interpreted literally’ (2008: 13).
Meillassoux’s real interest is not primarily epistemic. Rather he is concerned that the divide between philosophy and empirical claims about the ancestral allows for the return of fundamentalist fideisms against which thought is powerless to critique, because the ‘correlationist’ has destabilised rational appeal to absolute knowledge claims. He thus observes ‘by forbidding reason any claim to the absolute, the end of metaphysics has taken the form of an exacerbated return of the religious . . . [such that] . . . the contemporary end of metaphysics is an end which, being skeptical, could only be a religious end of metaphysics’ (2008: 45–6, emphasis in original). The ‘correlationist two-step’ levels all claims into varying degrees of belief. Science becomes another variety and ‘faith is pitched against faith, since what determines our fundamental choices cannot be rationally proved’ (2008: 46).
Meillassoux identifies a troubling dynamic of contemporary geopolitics, but his response is less ‘speculative’ than it appears. Rather than challenge the operation of a bifurcation that, sometimes in the name of ‘science’, denies the relevance of much of experience, Meillassoux ratifies it uncritically. Primary qualities thus refer to ‘all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms’ (2008: 3) with no thought of the extent to which mathematical formulations can be expressed variably, as differential relations, as topological invariants, and so on. Construing primary qualities as the ultimate metaphysical reality begs the question in assuming that what exists is best conceptualised as stable discrete objects:
we acknowledge that the sensible only exists as a subject’s relation to the world; but on the other hand, we maintain that the mathematizable properties of the object are exempt from the constraint of such a relation, and that they are effectively in the object in the way in which I conceive them. (Meillassoux 2008: 3)
The virtue of Meillassoux’s analysis is also its vice. In relying on a sharply wielded primacy of exclusive disjunction, Meillassoux assumes the universal determinacy of oppositional terms: the rational and the irrational, thought and being, and so on. There is no middle ground. This makes for strong argumentation, but bad metaphysics.
Without loosening the universal determinacy of such oppositions, attempts to challenge Meillassoux’s framing are easily accused of playing the two-step. Given the basic relational structure of Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s metaphysics, it would not be difficult to read them as correlationists. This is impeccable argumentative strategy, but it remains entirely external to the real speculative stakes of the constructions under development. Entering into these respective constructions requires relinquishing the certainty that such broad categories (rational and irrational, thought and being) refer to determinate and fixed domains. Does this mean that we must succumb to the ‘irrational’ fideisms that Meillassoux is worried about? This worry is why Meillassoux wants to renew the cogency of epistemic access to ‘absolute truth’ and reinstall the sciences as indisputable authority. Without this,
the struggle against what the Enlightenment called ‘fanaticism’ has been converted into a project of moralization: the condemnation of fanaticism is carried out solely in the name of its practical (ethico-political) consequences, never in the name of the ultimate falsity of its contents. (2008: 47)
That is, according to Meillassoux, we need to be able to say, definitively, that some content is false and some is true.4
But there is another way to approach the problem of fanaticisms and fundamentalisms. Indeed, in one sense Meillassoux’s response is to double down on the logic inherent in all fundamentalisms, that of the one true perspective. By contrast, the implications of both Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s metaphysics destabilise any fundamentalist orientation. Meillassoux reads this as a licensing of all views as equally worthy – but this presumes that perspectivism is simply subjective. It presumes the subject invents their perspective willy-nilly. But for both Whitehead and Deleuze this is simply not the case. Perspectives are not the invention of a subject, rather, they are the forms of relational activity through which reality unfolds. Indeed, because of this structure, no single perspective can detach from this unfolding process and declare a final authority. Rather than opening up a maelstrom of fundamentalists, this shows why fundamentalisms, including scientific fundamentalisms, are reductive and partial.5
This is also not a giving up of the absolute per se, but rather a reconceptualising of its function. This is especially the case for Whitehead, who does not hesitate to name a conceptual operator ‘God’. And yet, if it is still appropriate to characterise this ‘God’ as absolute, it can never be in an epistemic sense. When Whitehead conceives God ‘under [an] image’ that manifests a ‘tender care that nothing be lost’, the loss in question is not about knowledge, but rather the inheritance of feeling that has passed into ‘objective immortality’ (PR: 346). ‘God’ functions as reservoir of what has happened because these events and occasions were both not predetermined (this is Leibniz’s solution) but also remain real as conditions for a future that remains open. God does not function to predict the future, but to conserve the past in a radically inclusive manner.6 Rather than epistemic or moral, the ‘tender care that nothing be lost’ is a profound commitment to immanence – no matter how banal, no event or occasion is completely lost or disappeared. This entails an infinity beyond the possibility of human knowledge, but this does not make it irrational.
Meillassoux’s use of ‘absolute’, by contrast, is always in an epistemic sense: ‘we must take up once more the injunction to know the absolute’ (2008: 28, emphasis added). This is a far cry from Whitehead’s fallibilism where ‘in its turn every philosophy will suffer a deposition’ (PR: 7). The motivation of this fallibilism, and the hinge of the difference, is a metaphysical intuition about the nature of the real (call it the Absolutely real). For Meillassoux, however it may turn out that this real ‘is’, its existence is independent of human activity or thought. To say otherwise is to invoke the ‘correlation’. But a process metaphysics rejects the framing by affirming both that the activity of theorising is part of the processes of reality and that this theorising can be more or less effective in how it understands these processes because they are not co-extensive. Theorising is part of the unfolding, but reality exceeds the human perspective on it. And it is because of (a) this excess and (b) the ongoing and continuing nature of the unfolding that any static claim of ‘absolute’ knowledge is to be viewed with suspicion. But this does not mean that ‘ancestral’ claims cannot function in a relatively strong epistemic sense. Nor does it mean that empirically verifiable predictions do not gain more credence than a single isolated and non-confirmed revelation. It merely keeps open the possibility that there is more to know, that we do not know it all.
Perspectivism is not primarily an epistemic claim about the equal relativity of all ‘opinions’, but rather part of the processual functioning of the universe. That is, it is a part of the metaphysical process that involves how the universe (‘God’) comes to know itself and grow. Such metaphysics do not insist on an in principle incompatibility between religious practice (not the same as doctrine), metaphysics and science.7 Nor do they amount to humanist correlationism or subjective idealism, though they do reorient what ‘realist’ attention to experience means.8 In this respect, Whitehead’s reconstruction of the primary-secondary-tertiary distinction is crucial. Through this reconstruction we can understand Whitehead’s philosophy as realist without being correlationist, though it remains relational. What changes is what is being related and how. In this way, Whitehead offers a differently attuned realism.
Since the basic intuitions driving the primary-secondary-tertiary distinction arise from pervasive aspects of experience, Whitehead’s reconstruction cannot be exclusively phenomenogical. Rather, his speculative reinterpretation involves three interrelated operations: (1) phenomenological description; (2) conceptual genealogical diagnosis; (3) speculative construction. Their combined result is an inversion of the metaphysical status of the primary, secondary and tertiary. Tertiary qualities and secondary qualities, though they no longer correspond unequivocally to ordinary psychological representation, become closer to the real. Primary qualities by contrast increase in degree of abstraction because they presuppose a ‘simple location’ where ‘each bit of matter [is] self-contained, [and] localized in a region with a passive, static network of spatial relations’ (MT: 138).9
This inversion is implausible without close attention to the constructions enabling it. While speculative, these constructions are linked to Whitehead’s prevailing radical empiricism, where ‘[philosophy’s] generalizations must be based upon the primary elements in actual experience as starting points’ (PR: 158). Whitehead begins with a Jamesian depiction of experience as primarily a field of vague and intensive feeling. This phenomenological description challenges commitments to experience as built up through discrete sense impressions. Instead, what is most basic in such a field is ‘blind’ feeling, ‘felt in its relevance to a world beyond’ (PR: 163). While the feeling is ‘blind and the relevance is vague’ (PR: 163), this is not the blindness of Kant’s intuition that requires a concept of the understanding to be resolved into coherence. Rather, the feeling already possesses a vector character, even if it is vague. It is a ‘feeling from a beyond which is determinate and pointing to a beyond which is to be determined’ (PR: 163).10 While ultimately Whitehead’s concept of feeling exceeds the phenomenological, for the present the challenge is to any naïve claim that primary qualities are basic elements of experience. Such claims fail to notice pervasive experiential qualities always present in some degree. Because metaphysics, as such, must be explanatorily adequate at the broadest possible degree of generality, it cannot ignore that which is always present. And yet this is precisely what most theories do in generalising from a narrow or specialised selection of experience: ‘philosophers have disdained the information about the universe obtained through their visceral feelings, and have concentrated on visual feelings’ (PR: 121).11 The scale of ordinarily experienced constituted objects is not phenomenologically primary: ‘those elements of our experience which stand out clearly and distinctly in our consciousness are not its basic facts; they are the derivative modifications which arise in the process’ (PR: 162).12
This phenomenological re-description alone is not enough to enact a metaphysical inversion since it can be accommodated as psychological or perceptual only. We might grant that subjective experience begins in a feel-ing-laden field but enlist this field into prevailing assumptions of a substance ontology with the feelings of this field predicated of subject or self. This assumption has the appearance of clarity, but Whitehead develops a conceptual genealogy to show how it is built on inconsistent commitments.13
Whitehead’s diagnosis demonstrates his conception of philosophy as ‘the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity’ (PR: 15). What he means by this is counter-intuitive to the ordinary polarity of these terms. An excess of subjectivity mistakes abstractions for concrete experience. In particular, it neglects two experiential phenomena: (1) the presence of a felt past as it informs a present; (2) the unfinished character of presence as transitional and vectorial. Denying these features, positivist empiricisms are for example excessively subjective despite claiming to begin with only what is given.
Correcting excess of subjectivity means tracking the ideas that generate it. The basic inconsistency is a combination of the substance-predicate metaphysical form derived from Aristotle with what Whitehead calls the Cartesian ‘subjectivist principle’: ‘The difficulties of all schools of modern philosophy lie in the fact that, having accepted the subjectivist principle, they continue to use philosophical categories derived from another point of view’ (PR: 167).14 The substance-predicate scheme conceptualises existence in terms of stable substances qualified by predicates. Whether we are talking about essential qualities of a chair (its ‘chairness’ as artefact for sitting) or accidental qualities (location, colour, material, and so on) both are thought as properties inhering in an underlying substance.
The ‘subjectivist principle’ is the idea that ‘those substances which are the subjects enjoying conscious experiences provide the primary data for philosophy, namely, themselves as in the enjoyment of such experience’ (PR: 159). Whitehead has in mind Descartes’s retreat, through procedures of radical doubt, to the foundational certainty of the cogito. More technically, the subjectivist principle is the claim that ‘the datum in the act of experience can be adequately analysed purely in terms of universals’ (PR: 157). Features of subjectivist experience are analysed as particulars which exemplify universal qualities: redness, roundness, hardness, and so on.
Based on this principle, experience is always tied to an experiencing subject. In conjunction with the subject-predicate metaphysical scheme, this subject is approached as a primary substance. Such a primary substance, following Aristotle, ‘is always a subject and never a predicate’ (PR: 157). (This remains definitional in how Descartes describes res cogito.) We now have to explain the relation between such a primary substance, the cogito, and the qualitative predicates that inhere in it. These predicates, as per the subjectivist principle, are typically analysed as repeatable universals (redness, sweetness, bitterness, and so on). So we have a repeatable universal predicated of a non-repeatable substance (sensation of greyness predicated of substance mind). What is this non-repeatable substance? It is presupposed, but difficult to explain, especially since it cannot itself be experienced.
Whitehead’s analysis is largely Humean to this point. However, he adds his own tracing of its conceptual roots to the inconsistent combination of the subjectivist principle and the subject-predicate metaphysical scheme. In response, Whitehead gives up the latter (subject-predicate metaphysical scheme) and reworks the former (subjectivist principle). On his ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ the locus of experience is not a pre-existent subject (understood as a primary substance), but rather the occasion of experience itself. This is a significant speculative construction, but one that, in some sense, follows Occam’s razor by not multiplying entities. What is given in experience is the occasion of experience, nothing more. Whitehead adopts the language of subject to apply to the actual occasion itself. In doing so, he denies the premise that ‘divides qualities and primary substances into two mutually exclusive classes’ and instead admits only ‘two ultimate classes: . . . actual entities . . . and forms of definiteness’ (PR: 158). The former correspond to actuality and incorporate aspects of both substance and quality, while the latter, with some qualification, correspond to a realm of potentiality.
Whitehead’s construction, motivated to avoid the inconsistencies inherent in combining these two principles, allows him to read Locke’s primary-secondary-tertiary distinction in an original way. Locke distinguished between primary, secondary and tertiary qualities to understand the experiential sources of different kinds of ideas. He links these qualities to varying ‘powers’ of objects of sense perception. Primary and secondary qualities are as sketched above in the opening paragraphs of the chapter. But tertiary qualities are somewhat different in referring to relational powers, whether active or passive. For example, in addition to its primary (size) and secondary (heat, light) qualities, the sun has the tertiary quality or power of melting, whereas snow has the tertiary quality of melt-ability (PR: 81, II.8.24).
Whitehead believes Locke’s analysis is ‘hampered by inappropriate metaphysical categories’ (PR: 51). Adopting his ‘reformed subjectivist principle’ and rejecting the necessity of the subject-predicate scheme, Whitehead approaches qualities or ‘powers’ not simply as demarcating epistemic differences, but as expressing different ways actual occasions relate to, and thus contribute to, one another. The locus of these relations is no longer either the object or self-standing mind. Locke’s interest in analysing the source of ideas comes with the assumption that ideas function as qualities in a self-standing substance, that is, the Cartesian subjectivist principle. Adopting the reformed subjectivist principle, Whitehead uses Locke’s analysis not as applying to how human ideas represent objects in the world, but rather as indicating how one subject of experience (an actual entity) relates to others:
If he had started with the one fundamental notion of an actual entity, the complex of ideas disclosed in consciousness would have at once turned into the complex constitution of the actual entity disclosed in its own consciousness, so much as it is conscious – fitfully, partially, or not at all. (PR: 53)
From here, the significant question is understanding how different occasions inform, constrain and relate to one another. Tertiary powers define limits and possibilities of ‘how each individual actual entity contributes to the datum from which its successors arise and to which they must conform’ (PR: 56). Secondary and tertiary qualities are thus more relevant for individuating entities that perdure over time precisely because actual occasions, as subjects of themselves, are not equivalent to macro-scale conventional objects (and subjects) of experience ordinarily conceived. Indeed, Whitehead describes such enduring ‘things’ as results of the ‘historic’ route of tertiary qualities or powers – one actual occasion imposing on the next a constellation of ‘powers’, that is, what it can be affected by and what it can affect: ‘likeness between the successive occasions of historic route procures a corresponding identity between their contributions to the datum of any subsequent actual entity; and it therefore secures a corresponding intensification in the imposition of conformity’ (PR: 56). A macro-level object is actually constituted by ongoing actual occasions that hang together through relational inheritances akin to tertiary qualities.15
Whitehead’s speculative construction goes far beyond the phenomenological. The actual occasion is not equivalent to subjective representations. If Whitehead wants to develop Locke more consistently, it is metaphysical consistency he is seeking. Whitehead’s point is that you need not appeal to the ‘something I know not what’ if you adopt the actual occasion as the inclusive metaphysical category.16 Departing from Locke’s own preoccupations, Whitehead’s inversion is more accurately a redefinition, since the prevailing understanding of the three qualities is question-begging within Whitehead’s metaphysics.
One consequence is a denial that there must be an underlying sameness to ground the identity of an object, idea or being. Speaking strictly, ‘the exterior things of successive moments are not to be identified with each other’ (PR: 55). They are not, formally, the same, since each actual occasion is its own individual.17 Furthermore, Whitehead’s analysis of actual occasions incorporates tertiary qualities with a broader category of ‘feeling’ as primary metaphysical operator. Feeling is ‘the term used for the basic generic operation of passing from the objectivity of the data to the subjectivity of the actual entity in question’ (PR: 40).18 Actual entities are constituted through and by the way they ‘feel’ previous and contemporary actual entities. Indeed, Whitehead understands ‘the primitive form’ of all experience to be ‘emotional feeling’ while reminding us that ‘emotion in human experience, or even in animal experience, is not bare emotion [feeling]’ (PR: 163). This is to say that feeling, as generic metaphysical operation, is not just a psychological term.19 More speculatively, feeling is not a predicate of a self-standing substance (this would repeat all of the problems leading to the bifurcation). It is rather a mode of operation that produces the actual occasion, understood as unit of satisfaction and occasion of reality. This raises two kinds of questions: (1) can we say more about the processes that lead to the occasion’s achievement?; and (2) given the distinction between metaphysical feeling and ordinary conceptions of emotion, how does the metaphysical account translate into existential terms?
Subjective aim and intensity
Feeling names processes by which an actual occasion becomes the actual occasion that it is. Whitehead repeatedly insists on its ‘vector’ character: ‘Feelings are “vectors”; for they feel what is there and transform it into what is here’ (PR: 87). But in the transformation from there to here, what is being transformed and how? Since the actual occasion is, in a certain sense, in relation with the entirety of the universe, how does it not simply repeat the universe? Where does its identifying particularity come from? What makes it different? In Whitehead’s words, ‘How can the other actual entities, each with its own formal existence, also enter objectively into the perceptive constitution of the actual entity in question?’, christening this the ‘problem of the solidarity of the universe’ (PR: 56).20
As a response, Whitehead’s doctrine of prehensions includes both relations of inclusion and exclusion. ‘Integrations’ of the actual occasion both include and exclude (always by degrees) in order to ‘terminate in a definite, complex unity of feeling’ (PR: 56).21 ‘Concrescence’ is not simply given, it is, rather, creative in the sense of adding something new. But simultaneously, this newness is not without relation to what has come before: ‘The creative action is the universe always becoming one in a particular unity of self-experience, and thereby adding to the multiplicity which is the universe as many’ (PR: 57, emphasis added). If prehensions include and exclude, can we say that prehension is the more abstract name given to feeling, that feeling names positive prehensions only, while the negative prehension is in some sense a refusal, rejection or otherwise inability to feel? In order to achieve ‘unity of feeling’, there must be a certain limiting of material, a negative prehension, a selection or omission.
And yet, this limiting or selection, in service of a process of concrescence that will ultimately add a new unity of experience to reality, must occur within a larger and more capacious feeling. If it did not, then Whitehead would have no way of explaining change or novelty in the future, since once an actual occasion had negatively prehended, it would appear that the ‘object’ of that negative prehension would no longer be available for subsequent prehensions. As we have seen, this is (one of) the conceptual roles played by what Whitehead calls ‘God’ conceived ‘under [an] image’ that manifests a ‘tender care that nothing be lost’ (PR: 346).22 In this regard, the primordial nature of God demarcates the limits of a potentiality that is ever-present: ‘viewed as primordial, [God] is the unlimited conceptual realization of the absolute wealth of potentiality. In this aspect, he is not before all of creation but with all of creation’ (PR: 343).23
And yet, this primordial nature is not for all that unconstrained by the occurrences of actual occasions – indeed, this is what Whitehead expresses by appeal to the ‘consequent nature’ of God. In preserving the consequences of actual occasions, these consequences place constraints on subsequent occasions. These are the ‘historic routes’ that constitute the reality of particular lives and subjects (PR: 89–90). Such routes are not a priori necessary nor determined by the primordial nature of God. But they do constrain subsequent occasions to some extent. As Debaise puts it: ‘each act takes up the acts that came before and transmits to those that follow’ (2017a: 68). For questions of novelty and change, everything depends on the extent of the constraint. If history is contingent from a rational standpoint in not following a predetermined order, it is also constraining for the possibilities to come. Contingency has necessary effects. Openness is affirmed but also constrained by what has occurred. The consequent nature of God is ‘determined, incomplete . . . and fully actual’ (PR: 345, emphasis added).
For this reason, the stakes of negative and positive prehensions, of inclusion and exclusion, extend beyond the individual satisfaction of the actual occasion. How are we to understand the motivation of these ‘choices’ in the occasion?24 Unity of feeling is the goal, but this unity is neither given nor fully imposed in the receptive phase. And yet, while Whitehead grants that the actual occasion is in one sense causa sui (PR: 86), in another sense it is embedded in the context and possibilities of what is given for it:
No actual entity can rise beyond what the actual world as a datum from its standpoint – its actual world – allows it to be. Each such entity arises from a primary phase of the concrescence of objectifications which are in some respects settled: the basis of its experience is ‘given’. (PR: 83)
Its actual world is already limited because this limitation is a necessary condition of its coherence (its ‘order’), and yet this order is also specific to this standpoint, that is, there is no general coherence or order that applies for all time and place. Moreover, the limitation of the actual occasion’s standpoint is not a full determination. Rather, the actual occasion necessarily requires an ‘originative decision’ and it is in this sense that it can be said to be causa sui (PR: 86).
This originative decision involves how the occasion prehends its actual world. This prehensive ‘choice’ is entangled with what Whitehead calls its ‘subjective aim’. In one sense, all subjective aims are the same, the aim of an occasion just is its ‘satisfaction’ understood as the ‘attainment of something individual to the entity in question’ (PR: 84). But this appears circular. Indeed, as Whitehead readily notes, satisfaction is an entirely ‘generic term’. Forms of satisfaction (or ‘ways of enjoyment’ (MT: 152)) vary and display ‘gradation[s] of intensity’ (PR: 84). We can describe the ‘aim’ of the occasion as a generic term for a constitutive process in every concrescence, but we cannot determine how or what this aim is in the abstract alone, beyond noting the internal drive towards ‘satisfaction’. Satisfaction is in this sense its own reason or reward as achievement of a unified complex of feeling.
The issue then becomes how this satisfaction guides concrescence while still being immanent to it. Whitehead explicitly denies that ‘satisfaction’ can be a ‘component in the process’ of its concrescence. Indeed, satisfaction is linked precisely to the closure of this process as the effect of achieving a unity. We cannot use the goal of this achievement to explain how the occasion prehends or selects. Nor can this achievement be an external model or telos. Rather than a growing towards, a concrescence is ‘the building up of a determinate “satisfaction” which constitutes the completion of the actual togetherness of the discrete components’ (PR: 85).25 It is a process of feeling together into a unity, but the quality of this unity is not given beforehand.
In the appeal to the occasion as involving a decision in relation to the settled world, there thus remains a certain inexplicability. Whitehead returns to this in Modes of Thought, linking it to the very question of life and a sense in which the immediacy of the occasion’s self-enjoyment simply is its aim. Thinking about processes constitutive of ‘life’, Whitehead writes that these occasions display ‘a certain absoluteness of self-enjoyment’ that is its own reason (MT: 151). The self-enjoyment does not imply a subject beyond the occasion itself, rather ‘each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment [is] an occasion of experience’ (MT: 152). Furthermore, Whitehead notes that the intelligibility of his view ‘involves the notion of a creative activity belonging to the very essence of each occasion’ (MT: 151). This absoluteness of self-enjoyment is what Raymond Ruyer describes as ‘absolute or nondimensional survey’ (2016: 94). Like Whitehead, Ruyer understands this concept as key ‘to the problem of life’ insofar as it ‘allows us to grasp the difference between primary consciousness and secondary consciousness’ (2016: 94). For Ruyer, this absolute survey or ‘absolute auto-subjective domain’ is ‘essentially active and dynamic’ and metaphysically primary to ‘spatiotemporal structures given to it’ (2016: 99). For both Whitehead and Ruyer such auto-subjective enjoyment is not to be explained teleologically through reference to a further end. Rather, all ends in some sense return to this absoluteness of self-enjoyment.26
This raises a further question. If there remains a certain monadological structure to the very notion of absolute self-enjoyment, this absoluteness cannot be absolute isolation. Self-enjoyment is incoherent as isolation because the generation of enjoyment is a procedure of incorporating contrasts and differences into a complex unity of feeling. The greater the range of these differences, the greater the intensity of feeling achieved as self-enjoyment in the occasion. In a particularly challenging, but important, sentence, Whitehead observes: ‘intensity in the formal constitution of the subject-superject involves “appetition” in its objective functioning as superject’ (PR: 82).
This shows a consistent toggling between the ‘private’ individual satisfaction as indicated by the ‘formal constitution’ of the subject-superject and its public or ‘objective’ manifestation. The greater the intensity of range of contrasts included, the more powerful the ‘objective’ conditioning for future occasions: ‘the heightening of intensity arises from order such that the multiplicity of components in the nexus can enter explicit feeling as contrasts, and are not dismissed into negative prehensions as incompatibilities’ (PR: 83). Contrasts create the subjective occasion. As Jude Jones observes ‘to be a subject is to be a provoked instance of the agency of contrast, and that is all it is’ (1998: 130–1). The appetitive force of the occasion beyond itself is an effect of its achievement of intensity.
It is as if the intensity of the private satisfaction echoes through the objective or public realm and thus is more likely to condition future occasions more pervasively. If the ‘self-enjoyment’ which marks the achievement of the occasion is dependent on contrast, the intensity of inherited contrasts depends on the range of their incorporation of differences. Each actual occasion takes the multiplicity of diversity of other occasions and creates a new addition to this diversity: ‘Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of “feeling” the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual “satisfaction”’ (PR: 40).
This process of feeling the data is a ‘qualification of creativity’ (PR: 85). Creativity, in this sense, is the ultimate characterisation of reality, indeed Whitehead calls it ‘The Category of the Ultimate’ (PR: 21). The ‘ultimate’ of this category does not mean it is the highest aspiration, but rather that which must be presupposed by every other category: ‘The Category of the Ultimate expresses the general principle presupposed in the three more special categories [existence, explanation, obligations]’ (PR: 21). Whitehead unfolds this category according to three notions: ‘creativity’, ‘many’ and ‘one’. One stands for ‘the general idea underlying alike the indefinite article “a or an” and the definite article “the,” and the demonstratives “this or that,” and the relatives “which or what or how”’ (PR: 21). ‘Many’ and ‘one’ presuppose each other. ‘Creativity’, as ‘universal of universals’ is the ‘principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively’ (PR: 21, emphasis added). This movement, between many and one, between disjunction and conjunction, is necessary to explain why anything in the universe happens – that is, why it is not an inert static bloc.
But if feeling the data conjunctively qualifies ‘creativity’, what does this qualification add to the world? The satisfaction itself is over, closed and private. And yet it is also objective and immortal. Here is the rub: what passes over, what echoes on, is, for Whitehead, a ‘tone of feeling’: ‘the tone of feeling embodied in this satisfaction passes into the world beyond, by reason of these objectifications’ (PR: 85). Feeling appears as the means by which the actual occasion unifies what is there into a satisfaction of unity here, as well as the tone generated by this achievement of unification. This tone is what is taken up, subject to further modifications, in ongoing qualifications of future actual occasions.
We now return to the question of realisms and tertiary qualities. Understanding Whitehead’s philosophy as a perspectival realism hangs on understanding that the public/private polarity is inherent in all occasions of existence, not just those occasions consisting of what we ordinarily think of as sentient consciousness. This is also to say that ‘mental activity is one of the modes of feeling belonging to all actual entities in some degree’ (PR: 56, emphasis added). It is sentences like these which enable characterisations of Whitehead’s philosophy as ‘panpsychism’.27 From Meillassoux’s perspective, this disqualifies any claim to a realist philosophy and exhibits key features of what he calls ‘strong correlationism’. A strong correlationist metaphysics is
characterized by the fact that it hypostatizes some mental, sentient, or vital term: representation in the Leibnizian monad; Schelling’s nature, or the objective subject-object, Hegelian Mind; Schopenhauer’s Will; the Will (or Wills) to Power in Nietzsche, perception loaded with memory in Bergson, Deleuze’s Life. (Meillassoux 2008: 37)
In this case, everything depends on thinking by degrees. As Whitehead stresses, the model for what he calls ‘mental activity’ or ‘conceptual feeling’ is not human consciousness or sentience. Rather, such sentience represents a particularly specialised and exceptional version of this conceptual feeling (‘conceptual feelings do not necessarily involve consciousness’ (PR: 165)). It is a question of willingness to speculatively create a concept not captured by preconceived ideas of the split (public/private, mental/physical) in question. Many if not most actual occasions exhibit minimal ‘conceptual feeling’, but minimal is not necessarily zero, as Hartshorne puts it.28
Is Whitehead hypostatising a sentient term and ascribing ‘consciousness’ to everything? This question can just as easily be turned around. Choose your poison. Meillassoux could be accused of hypostatising the concept matter. Though ordinary modes of thought (‘common sense’) take matter as self-evident, they are structured by what Whitehead terms the fallacy of simple location in presuming that
it is adequate to state that [a bit of matter] is where it is, in a definite finite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any essential reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time. (SMW: 58)
In a consistent thread of Whitehead’s work he insists that such a conception of matter is no longer consistent with physics. Because it is based on ‘the notion of continuous stuff with permanent attributes . . . retaining its self-identity through any stretch of time’ (PR: 78), this (metaphysical) conception of matter makes it difficult to think the activity of quantum physics. It is a conceptual relic of the past which continues to operate in the present and in ordinary materialisms.
Given Meillassoux’s emphasis on the need for philosophy to legitimise the notion of science as providing absolute (rather than correlative) knowledge, it is odd that he appears content to implicitly operate with a definition of matter as inert and static. But, in a twist of ironic fate, he is in good company here, since it is Kant, the original ‘correlationist’, who defines matter in this way: ‘The concept of [lively matter] involves a contradiction, since the essential character of matter is lifelessness, inertia’ (1987 [1790]: §73, 276/395).
Choose your presumption then: death or life, stasis or creativity?29 If we insist on disputing with such broad abstractions, the question remains a vicious circle. Part of the effect of Whitehead’s and Deleuze’s speculative philosophies is to destabilise the assumption that these terms have a stable meaning that is metaphysically neutral. Of course, it is not difficult to cite passages in both to accuse of panpsychism or vitalism, if we presume those terms mark stable positions. Consider this well-known passage from Difference and Repetition:
What we call wheat is a contraction of the earth and humidity, and this contraction is both a contemplation and the auto-satisfaction of that contemplation. By its existence alone, the lily of the field sings the glory of the heavens, the goddesses and gods – in other words, the elements that it contemplates in contracting. What organism is not made of elements and cases of repetition, of contemplated and contracted water, nitrogen, carbon, chloride, and sulphates, thereby intertwining all the habits of which it is composed. (DR: 75, emphasis added)
Displaying Deleuze’s characteristic poetic rhetoric (heavens, goddesses and gods), this does not amount to an unequivocal statement of ‘vitalism’ unless we take it as a self-standing statement of ontology. More important than ‘vitalism’ is how the organism is made up of actions of ‘contemplation’ and ‘contraction’ – actions oriented by an ‘auto-satisfaction’ that echoes Whitehead. It is not so much an ascription of something called life to the elements, but a reconceptualisation of life as habits of repeating relational activities. This displays the ontological function of habits or contemplations in the case of an organism, but contemplation and habit are broader metaphysical categories (‘habit here manifests in its full generality’ (DR: 74)). They are not necessarily activities of the organism, but the activities by which an organism is constituted or composed. We can get smaller and smaller in thinking these activities of habitual contraction, of the ‘thousands of passive syntheses of which “we” are organically composed’ (DR: 74). At some point, the border between the living and the non-living is blurred and no longer primary metaphysically. What is primary is the activity of habit, contemplation and contraction. None of these requires a (human) mind or an organism. This is a different way of approaching matter, not an incorporation of matter into mind or of material into life.
Undoubtedly, this philosophical merry-go-round will keep spinning, especially if we continue to operate through concepts presumed determinate (mind, matter, spirit, rational, irrational, life, death) and leveraged in an oppositional dialectic. The question here is how thinking by degrees – coupled with a conceptual turn to making actions, processes and events primary – changes conceptions of experience. The status of tertiary qualities is one way to emphasise these effects.
I claimed above that tertiary qualities can be thought as ‘more real’ than ‘primary qualities’ because they are closer to the operative feelings by which actual occasions ‘feel’ their context and achieve their satisfaction. But after closer consideration of the metaphysical operation of feeling, this claim must be qualified. Indeed, failure to qualify this claim opens it to a charge of subjectivist relativism. Contemporary usage of tertiary qualities practically guarantees this charge since they are defined as relative to human pleasure. Locke’s original concept does not, however, since tertiary qualities need not have any human relation. They mark ‘powers’ of one ‘object’ in relation to another. Whitehead shifts the locus of Locke’s analysis from self-standing objects and minds and replaces them with the ‘actual occasion’. What exists are actual occasions. Tertiary qualities are descriptions of how one occasion objectifies the diversity of its context and the effects that this has on contexts for future occasions.
How does this translate into experience of tertiary qualities? How we answer this question depends on willingness to understand the reality of experience’s excess to the language of its representation. It depends on a capacious scope to the term experience, in which we may be living realities we are not conscious of, and yet which have real effects on our lives. For example, we might say the sun-snow relation is characterised by tertiary qualities of meltability/melt-provoking (heat). This is clearly in one sense true, but it is also a significant abstraction. But these are abstractions by which we represent a real potential relation in the actual occasions constituting snow and sun. Do we experience this real potential relation directly? This question is why Elizabeth Grosz repeatedly emphasises the asubjective, non-phenomenological nature of sensations, affects and intensities:
What differentiates them from experience, or from any phenomenological framework, is the fact that they link the lived or phenomenological body with cosmological forces, forces of the outside, that the body itself can never experience directly. Affects and intensities attest to the body’s immersion and participation in nature, chaos, materiality. (2008: 3)30
Deleuze’s distinction between difference and empirical or qualitative diversity is useful here, since it complicates reading Whitehead’s ‘feeling’, and by extension, tertiary qualities, as directly equivalent to ordinary modes of representation. As Deleuze puts it, ‘Diversity is given, but difference is that by which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse’ (DR: 222). The diversity of phenomenal qualities, what we perceive, both secondary and tertiary qualities, are manifestations of metaphysical difference: ‘Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of difference: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity’ (DR: 222, emphasis in original).
For this reason, Deleuze declares that ‘intensity is the form of difference in so far as this is the reason of the sensible’ (DR: 222). Intensity cannot be rendered in the direct language of qualities because qualities already have cancelled out or explained the differences in intensity that produce them. In a sense, any stable phenomenal quality is a sign that is composed of series of differences. The eye sees red, but this red ‘signs’ a series of heterogeneous relations, light, pressure, neural charges, and so on. The quality of the red varies as intensive degrees change, each of which has differential effects on other variables. Series reverberate and extend, ‘each intensity is already a coupling . . . we call this state of infinitely doubled difference which resonates to infinity disparity’ (DR: 222).31 Thus, any static rendering of a tertiary quality is not sufficient: ‘the reason of the sensible, the condition of that which appears, is . . . the Unequal itself, disparateness as it is determined and comprised in differences of intensity, in intensity as difference’ (DR: 223).
Deleuze’s rendering of disparateness is closely related to Whitehead’s ultimate of ultimates, creativity. Disparateness and creativity are not experienced in themselves, though everything that is experienced is a qualification of disparateness or creativity, in varying degrees or intensities. Whitehead’s feeling can be thought through the language of tertiary qualities only if we de-subjectify these qualities. Put in psychological terms: anger, fear, pleasure, sorrow, joy are human terms that explain real occasional effects, but the feelings of these occasions extend beyond the confines of the human. This is not to ascribe anger qua human emotion to nonhuman occasions, it is to explain anger qua human emotion as representing a real feeling of occasions.
The distinction between intensive and extensive features is also useful here. Deleuze and Whitehead both use this technical distinction to complicate empiricisms. Both intensive and extensive features are, in one sense, experienced. But only the latter are able to be represented.
It turns out that, in experience, intensio (intension) is inseparable from an extensio (extension) which relates to the extensum (extensity). In these conditions, intensity itself is subordinated to the qualities which fill extensity (primary physical qualities or qualitas and secondary perceptible qualities or quale). In short, we know intensity only as already developed within an extensity, and as covered over by qualities. (DR: 223)32
My earlier claim can be restated with more precision. Human experience of tertiary qualities is more real if taken as a sign (not an equivalent) of the metaphysical operations of feeling constitutive of actual occasions. This means they must be interpreted and are not directly self-certifying in any normative sense. But it still follows that primary qualities are not the most concrete expressions, but rather are more abstract. In this sense, while still real, they are less intensely implicated in processes of concrescence constituting actual occasions.
Attention, attunement and becoming-imperceptible?
How does Whitehead’s metaphysical ‘feeling’ relate to the concept of ‘affect’ so important to Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus? As is well known, Deleuze’s and Guattari’s use is derived primarily from Spinoza with affect referring to the ‘ability to affect and be affected’ (ATP: xvi).33 At first, it appears that the two discussions are incompatible, since discussion of affect occurs at the level of bodies, whereas Whiteheadean feeling is prior to bodies, that is, feeling is that by which bodies do or do not cohere.
Deleuze and Guattari follow Spinoza in asking ‘what can a body do?’ (ATP: 256) and thus appear to presuppose the body as existent entity. But this reading presumes habits of a substance-predicate ontology and is easily complicated. For one, bodies themselves are described as consisting of both ‘latitude’ and ‘longitude’: ‘Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling under a capacity and longitude of extensive parts falling under a relation’ (ATP: 256–7). Latitude is more important for affect: ‘the latitude of a body [is] the affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power’ (ATP: 256). Affect thus refers to the shifting capacity or power of intensive parts of bodies in relation. The use of ‘intensive part’ here is confusing, since parts are more readily conceivable in relation to extension. But it appears that the reference has to do with the extent to which a body is neither exclusively extensive nor intensive. As such, ‘the latitude of a body’ refers to ‘affects of which it is capable at a given degree of power’ (ATP: 256). Intensive parts refer to degrees of power and different degrees mean different intensive parts: while the longitudinal relations of the body refer to its varying contact with other bodies, latitudinally there is the body under duress, under joy, under sorrow, and so on. Consider the intensive degree of the eye under conditions of intense labour or in the precision of a desert dawn.
Deleuze and Guattari also state that ‘affects are becomings’ (ATP: 256). It is not that the body has an affect but rather that affect conditions and shapes bodies in dynamic processes. The ‘same’ body becomes different under differing affective conditions, up to a limit or threshold at which point changes in intensities push the body’s arrangement past a current form of recognition.34 This relational or affective capacity is ontologically prior to categories of species and genus or metaphysical forms or essences. A body is defined by ‘counting its affects’, not locating its essence, and, as such, affects cut across traditional taxonomies: ‘a racehorse is more different from a workhouse than a workhorse is from an ox’ (ATP: 257). Indeed, on what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘plane of consistency’ – which corresponds to reality prior to its consolidation and representation into macro-level entities and objects – there are ‘nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds’ (ATP: 260).
Affect, like Whitehead’s feeling, is thus also metaphysically prior to objects and bodies that it conditions. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari go further in discussing haecceity as a mode of individuation ‘very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance’ (ATP: 261). Haecceities ‘consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected’ (ATP: 261).35 Such haecceities ‘have a concrete individuation’ that ‘direct the metamorphosis of things and subjects’ (ATP: 256). Deleuze and Guattari offer several indications of what such a mode of individuation means experientially. Think of the individuality of a ‘degree of heat’, an ‘intensity of white’, a certain gust of wind. In a sense, we can think of haecceities as an effort to develop an existential language for a pre-personal processive view of individuations in experience. This is why they say that ‘the individuation of a life is not the same as the individuation of the subject that leads it’ (ATP: 261). A life, in its precise haecceity, is excessive to how the subject narrates its meaning. This is why abrupt shifts and changes in understanding are possible. Another way of putting this, in hybrid language with Whitehead, a life is an abstract name for a relative consistency in the qualifying feelings of actual occasions.
Deleuze and Guattari differ from Whitehead, however, in valorising the possibility of existential experience of haecceity, even flirting with making it normative: ‘For you will yield nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that’ (ATP: 262). Such realisation alters orientation towards the events of life:
You are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of nonsubjectified affects. You have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration) – a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack . . . Or at least you can have it, you can reach it. (ATP: 262, emphasis added)
But why would one want to reach this? Deleuze and Guattari have just taken pains to insist that the subject and a life are distinguishable as manifestations on different planes. A life occurs on the ‘plane of consistency or of composition of haecceities which knows only speeds and affects’, whereas the subject lives on the ‘plane of forms, substances, and subjects’ (ATP: 262). How do these two planes intersect?
Clearly, Deleuze and Guattari valorise the plane of consistency, but everything depends on how this valorisation proceeds. It cannot be a matter of making one plane ‘real’ and the other ‘illusion’, though they flirt with this in some of their language. It is a question rather of living your individuation process to its greatest intensity. Insofar as one does not realise the plane of consistency and its haecceities, one remains insulated from this intensity. But this cannot mean simply dismissing the plane of forms and substances, can it? Rather, how do we navigate both planes in a way that does not diminish or reduce the intensities potential in haecceity?
Haecceities as modes of individuation means construing subjects as events:
the wolf, the horse, the child . . . cease to be subjects to become events, in assemblages that are inseperable from an hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air . . . The street enters into a composition with the air, and the beast and the full moon enter into composition with each other. (ATP: 262)
What is individuated by haecceities differs from ordinary demarcations of a substance ontology. The event is the assemblage is the individual haecceity. Separations into constituent entities are effects of analysis. Ontologically, it is the whole assemblage that is taken as the event of individuation: ‘climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken with them’ (ATP: 263). The plane of forms and substances separates, through procedures of analysis, what originally comes together. Deleuze and Guattari suggest that realising this togetherness has positive ‘affects’ – that is, it increases or augments the power of the body that realises it. At once, however, and paradoxically, the condition of this augmentation is a realisation that one does not possess power as an independent sovereign because any such independence requires separation and denial of the assemblage of haecceity.
A life is its relational events, and the quality of the affect garnered, transmitted and conducted through these events varies according to capacity to realise their haecceity: ‘This animal is this place! . . . That is how we need to feel’ (ATP: 263). It is not you and the music, it is: you-listening-to-the-music. That’s the haecceity, that’s the event. But already this example raises worries, as if there were just ‘you’ and the ‘music’. What about all of the other ‘yous’?
If the goal of individuation is separating and determining precise boundaries between one entity and another, then haecceity as mode of individuation must be rejected. This is ironic, since haecceity can also be thought of as the most precise and singular mode of individuation possible, but its realisation challenges the determinability of precise boundaries generalisable from any abstract perspective. Haecceity cannot serve the interests of property or possession. As Deleuze and Guattari say: ‘A haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination: it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only of lines’ (ATP: 263), which is to say tendencies, directions and actions in process.
Experientially, it does seem that the song comes to an end, the concert finishes, the band leaves the building. And yet its echoes continue. We eat the last morsel, but when does the dinner end? Is it when the last molecule is integrated into the eating body? Notoriously then, an event-based ontology seems unable to distinguish one event from the other, they bleed together, we are always in the middle, never arriving. Again, the question returns: why do Deleuze and Guattari say that this is ‘how we need to feel’ (ATP: 263)?
This question occupies the bulk of Part II. I end the chapter with a few remarks as promissory notes. Taking this seriously heightens stakes of attention. Sensibility, affective range of capacity, attention to specificity and intensity are manners of activity that shape individuated moments. Moments are synthesised through feeling forms that bring together a range of disparate data into a unique experience. While these feelings alone are not fully determinate, they are also not merely subjective in a psychological sense. Or rather, they are subjective, but the locus of the ‘subject’ is the occasion, not a macro-organism.
Alterations in attention have the potential to transform an individuating moment, because attention is a crucial component enacting the form of the occasion.36 Since each actual occasion is in relation to all others in gradations of relevance, intensity and importance, then what gets left out partially shapes the form of what gets included. Neither is independent of the other. Responding to this dynamic emphasises the relation between the speculative and the experiential: can a shift in attitude towards this relation alter the ‘decision’ of actual occasions? Actual occasions are not directly equivalent to experiential events as these are consciously represented. They are rather, in a sense, the condition of possibility underlying the conscious understanding of the events of life as they occur. Actual occasions are continuously occurring below the threshold of awareness as the constitutive conditions of that awareness. But here we must inject a further caution: actual occasions are themselves conceptual constructions designed as more coherent means of thinking reality. As an abstract frame then, there is a way in which, provided we don’t make it an equivalent, the actual occasion is flexible enough to also apply to experiential events. At the very least, there can be no essential gap between experiential events and actual occasions.
For this reason, what James Williams diagnoses as the two problems of an empiricist representation of experience become centrally problematic for thinking the stakes of attention. These are what he calls ‘empirical oblivion’ and ‘latent significance’ (Williams 2010). The former refers to the necessary limitation inherent in any representation of an event: ‘any record of an event involves forgetting aspects of that event which may later turn out to be of great significance’ (Williams 2010: 25). The latter is the possibility that precisely this forgotten aspect may re-emerge in the future as significant. For Deleuze, these problems are correlative: ‘neither is complete without the other and any real event is both an event of erasure and a novel reawakening’ (Williams 2010: 30). Both problems are inherent in the intersection between attention and actual occasions. In understanding attention as always implicated in erasure (or limitation) and the possibility of emerging significance, could a more capacious attention alter the selections of occasions? This conceptual question does not translate directly to an intentional operation: we cannot simply choose to notice what we have not noticed in the past.37
To what extent can attention, differently motivated, become attuned to more expansive ontological levels of occasions? Another way of putting this is to what extent can attention, differently motivated, change the subjective form of the actual occasion? The implications of this question are twofold: more modestly, a shift in subjective form is a shift in feeling that brings features or elements of actual reality into view that were previously unseen. This can inspire a greater awareness of embeddedness in relations excessive to narrow self-interests. In this sense, it may inspire what I call an ecological attunement. More radically, a shift in subjective form, in shifting the concrescence of actual occasions, changes reality. It changes what becomes real.
The distance between the modest and the radical implications is the distance between the phenomenological and the speculative. The bridge between these depends on exploring affect or feeling without presuming these are fully captured in the language of emotional states. Understanding feeling as not fully dependent on a subject, that is, as not a predicate of a substance, encourages an attention to dynamic patterns of energetics that can be a-subjective: the rigorous rush of wind through the boughs of the pine, the slow outward rippling of concentric circles after a single stone disrupts the surface of the pond.38 An ecological attunement understands such kinetic dynamisms to be more than just pretty pictures, but expressions of interdependence out of which subjects arise. Deleuze’s and Guattari’s ‘becoming-imperceptible’ has this kind of attunement in mind, an attunement to the molecular presence of events.
Metaphysical accounts of affect and feeling also help explain how experience of tertiary qualities is both highly variant and yet still responsive to an extra-subjective real excessive to the subjective perceiver. They help make sense of the intuition that one’s perception of, say, the charged ambience of the forest at twilight as the light shifts and the shadows lengthen, is not merely a trick of the subjective mind, even as this verbal description inevitably simplifies the actual relations it expresses. Something real drives each auto-satisfaction of occasion, beyond only the primary qualities typically conflated with physical reality. This encourages us to pay more attention to the affective feel of a place, to not dismiss this as ‘just in our head’. As Whitehead enigmatically puts it: ‘We experience the green foliage of the spring greenly’ (AI: 250). This does not mean the descriptions through which these feelings are shared are normatively conclusive in any traditional epistemic sense. But it does mean that they are expressive of a reality that is not purely subjective in the sense of the human subject alone. The greenly experienced foliage is an experience of something real beyond the boundaries of its human representation. When artists express the beauty of the greenly felt spring, this expression is shared with other occasions that make up that spring. The greenly felt subjective form informs other actual occasions which in turn cluster into other societies. Whitehead’s structure cuts across a presumed opposition between the merely private and subjective and the assumed objective or normative. Satisfactions of occasions are at once private and singular and public and objective. The quality of the feeling exceeds the feel-er.
The feeling at the top of the mountain encountered by the human interloper is not just a trick of human psychology, though access to the feeling is modulated through the prevailing habits of that psychology. But there is a feeling there – or, more accurately, there are many feelings there – that drive the ongoing coalescence of actual occasions. Deleuze writes that ‘the landscape sees’, using language to express something that is not technically ‘a’ landscape, as unified subject, ‘seeing’, but rather the myriad occasions of feeling that the landscape is (WIP: 169). The feelings that move through one in these events are also, potentially, part of the landscape’s seeing. This is not a claim of identity, it is one of participation: ‘We are not in the world, we become with the world; we become by contemplating it’ (WIP: 169). Feelings change as relations shift, and indeed the ‘entities’ of the mountain top are consistently unfolding new implications of the past route of occasions driven vectorially through feeling. The wind, the changing weather, the arrivals and departures of macroscopic organisms are all factors in the synthesis of each specific and singular actual occasion at this nexus. A first step in becoming more attuned to such feelings, and thus becoming more attuned to a wider range of relations beyond the narrowly anthropocentric, is to acknowledge their reality. To thinkers of cultures in which this reality was never in doubt, this might seem like a flimsy conclusion. But given the degree to which the primary-secondary-tertiary structure remains entrenched in Western onto-epistemology, these arguments through the categories of Western philosophy may offer alternative routes towards related realisations.
Notes
1. Though a process metaphysics challenges the assumption that this is an exclusive disjunction, the terminology of realism and anti-realism is pervasive in contemporary philosophy. Braver 2007 is largely consistent with Meillassoux in narrating the history of Continental philosophy through the language of realism and anti-realism to put it in dialogue with analytic philosophy.
2. It is additionally striking that their apparent conceptual ease does not match their lived fervour. Disagreements are not launched over the length of the painting, but rather where it looks best.
3. Meillassoux refers to two techniques: (1) those using radioactive decay, most typically radiocarbon, and (2) techniques known as thermoluminescence dating that can determine the time elapsed since a sample was exposed to sunlight. He cites Roth and Pouty 1985. Meillassoux is primarily interested in the possibility of ancestral claims, not scrutiny of how they are technically produced.
4. Meillassoux connects the sceptical attack on absolute knowledge with a return of fundamentalism: ‘Having continuously upped the ante with skepticism and criticisms of the pretensions of metaphysics, we have ended up according all legitimacy in matters of veracity to professions of faith – and this no matter how extravagant their content’ (2008: 47).
5. The use of scientific fundamentalism is risky in the context of contemporary politically motivated attacks on science. I do not mean to open up a complete jettisoning of scientific consensus. I am rather referring to a rhetorical tendency to presume ‘absolute’ knowledge where in fact science remains, in principle, fallible and probabilistic. My reference to scientific fundamentalism therefore refers to a reductive view of science itself.
6. Whitehead develops a bipartite analysis of what he calls God’s ‘primordial’ and ‘consequent’ nature (PR: 343–51). The primordial nature of God grounds the potentiality of all reality. However, the consequent nature expresses the extent to which this potentiality remains open and not predetermined. The occurrences of actuality leave traces on the conditions for future occasions that are both contingent but constraining. Whereas the primordial nature of God is aligned with pure potential, the consequent nature of God is ‘determined, incomplete . . . and fully actual’ (PR: 345).
7. Meillassoux conflates religion and theology in a caricature of the ‘irrational’ or ‘fideist’. Moreover, the question of faith is always epistemic for him – it is not what one does with belief, but only the way that faith for him destabilises knowledge. Whitehead by contrast has a much more empirically adequate characterisation of religion as exhibiting four factors: ritual, emotion, belief and rationalisation (RM: 18).
8. Despite the intuitive appeal of Meillassoux’s reference to the mathematisable features of ‘an object’ as foundation for realism, Whitehead reminds us that ‘quantity’ is not the root of mathematical reasoning, but rather ‘pattern’: ‘beyond all questions of quantity, there lie questions of pattern, which are essential for the understanding of nature’ (MT: 143). For this reason, Meillassoux’s use of ancestral claims as an example of ‘absolute’ empirical claims are thin, since they presume a single metric order of temporal magnitude as absolute.
9. Whitehead’s diagnosis of the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ or ‘the fallacy of simple location’ is a consistent thread throughout his work. See, for example, SMW: 51, 58; PR: 137; MT: 137–40.
10. Both Shaviro 2014: 77–84 and Stengers 2011: 202–3 also recognise the importance of James’s ‘pure experience’ for this claim in Whitehead.
11. Whitehead on this point is closer to Bergson than the classical pragmatists as they are typically read, since he insists that the habits of the organism in experience are to some extent to be overcome in the interests of philosophising. See Allen 2013; and MT: 106.
12. This claim relies on Whitehead’s distinction between two modes of perception: ‘causal efficacy’ and ‘presentational immediacy’. The latter refers to sense perception as ordinarily conceived and is the sole form of perception acknowledged by ordinary empiricism. The former refers to the visceral felt sense of being constrained by conditions of physical reality. This analysis is prominent in Symbolism and PR (168–83). In Adventures of Ideas ‘causal efficacy’ is referred to as ‘nonsensuous perception’ (AI: 182–4). In Modes of Thought, the distinction is described as the contrast between ‘sense perception’ (presentational immediacy) and ‘primitive’ bodily experience (causal efficacy) (MT: 72–6, 112–17).
13. Though I use ‘genealogical’ in unorthodox fashion, it is consistent with the impetus behind typical usage. If Foucault, following Nietzsche, tracks historical and social conditions of possibility of a given episteme, Whitehead offers a metaphysical genealogy that is not the less historicised. That is, he tracks the structuring influence of metaphysical assumptions with specific historical roots in particular thinkers.
14. There is also the idea that we passively receive sense impressions rather than construct or shape them in some active fashion. Whitehead calls this the ‘sensationalist principle’: ‘the primary activity in the act of experience is the bare subjective entertainment of the datum, devoid of any subjective form of reception’ (PR: 167).
15. Whitehead calls such conventional objects and subjects ‘societies’. I investigate his reasons and manner of doing so at length in Chapter 4.
16. ‘If anyone will examine himself concerning his notion of pure substance in general, he will find he has no other idea of it at all, but only a supposition of he knows not what support of such qualities’ (Locke, II.XXIII.2).
17. The quality of sameness is located only within what Whitehead calls ‘societies’ – see Chapter 4.
18. Whitehead’s reading of Locke transmutes Locke’s conception of ‘idea’ into this operation of ‘feeling’: ‘Its [the formal entity] ideas of things are what other things are for it. In the phraseology of these lectures, they are its “feelings”’ (PR: 51).
19. Nevertheless, while the psychological experience of emotion is not equivalent to (metaphysical) feeling it is still that which ‘most closely resembles the basic elements of all experience’ (PR: 163).
20. Jorge Nobo declares this solidarity to be the ‘fundamental thesis of Whitehead’s metaphysical philosophy’ (1986: xiv) and its most fundamental problem. How do we understand this solidarity without positing an underlying stable substratum? That is, how is this solidarity both produced and fundamental?
21. Whitehead notes that the ‘classical doctrine of universals and particulars, of subject and predicate, of individual substances not present in other substances, of the externality of relations, alike render this problem incapable of solution’ (PR: 56).
22. When Whitehead reminds us that this ‘is but an image’, he highlights the extent to which his ‘God’ is not anthropomorphic (PR: 346). This tender care and ‘infinite patience’ are conceptual features, not characterisations of an agential deity.
23. In Deleuzean terms, this is a commitment to immanence rather than transcendence.
24. In his 1987 lecture on Whitehead, Deleuze adopts his own terminology for thinking about this: in what sense is the genesis of an actual occasion a ‘conjunction’ and how is this genesis related to the ‘disjunctive diversity’ that is its condition? Like Nobo, Deleuze understands what he calls ‘convergence’ (Whitehead’s ‘objectification’) as prior to ‘conjunction’ (his term for the genesis of the actual occasion akin to ‘concrescence’): ‘the first stage [is] the many or the disjunctive diversity . . . the third stage, the formation of series converging towards limits . . . the fourth stage . . . the actual occasion, it is the conjunction. The conjunction comes after the convergence’ (emphasis added, my translation). The lecture, which occurs during Deleuze’s seminar in preparation for The Fold, is notable for the attendance of Isabelle Stengers. Deleuze announces his discussion of Whitehead as inspired by Stengers’s presence: ‘I need some help [with] certain problems of physics . . . Isabelle Stengers is here today, and she will not be here the other weeks, [we should] profit from her presence’ (http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=140&groupe=Leibniz&langue=1 (my translation)). Unfortunately, Stengers’s response to Deleuze’s questions are frequently inaudible and not included in the transcription.
25. Whitehead analyses this ‘building up’ into phases. Understanding the status of these phases is a challenge. They cannot be temporal, linear or spatial parts, since this introduces a field pre-existing independently of the occasion. As Debaise notes, one source of confusion is a tendency to confuse the potential for analytic division with actual division. The actual entity or occasion, as Whitehead stresses, is a unity insofar as it is an achievement or activity of unifying. Nevertheless, if it can be analysed into parts, we should not understand this analysis to determine parts that exist separately. The mistake is that we substitute ‘the possible for the real’: ‘Because a totality can be divided we conclude that it is in fact actually divided, composed of distinct and divisible parts’ (2017a: 112).
26. Deleuze also adapts Ruyer’s ‘absolute survey’ (WIP: ix, 209–11). Ruyer frequently notes Whitehead’s influence in Neo-Finalism, and his description of ‘absolute survey’ as ‘form-in-itself of every organism and at one with life’ (2016: 98), is clearly consistent with Whitehead’s ‘satisfaction’. In both cases the effect is to posit an absoluteness that ‘dispenses with infinite regress’ (2016: 92). However, while Whitehead’s actual occasion remains fundamentally speculative, Ruyer uses ‘absolute survey’ in the service of phenomenological analysis of perception. See Ruyer 2016: 90–103.
27. Such characterisations can be sympathetic (Shaviro 2015) or dismissive (Rorty 1979). While they have some credence, they risk discouraging the need to consider the details of how Whitehead develops his view. Because ‘panpsychism’ is an easily articulated view, it is also easily denounced. ‘They’re saying that rocks have consciousness, whoever heard of such an absurdity! These philosophers will believe anything.’ This is not to say there is no place for engaging Whitehead’s thought through this lens, only that I find the term (which Whitehead does not use) to not be worth the risk.
28. Hartshorne formulates what he calls the ‘zero fallacy’ as follows: ‘with properties of which there can be varying degrees, the zero degree, or total absence, is knowable empirically only if there is a known least quantum or finite minimum, of the property’. For example: ‘A zero of elephants is observable because there is a finite minimum of what can properly be called an elephant’ (Hartshorne 1997: 166).
29. Part III ‘Nature and Life’ of Whitehead’s Modes of Thought outlines the fundamental stakes of this choice in emphasis. In ‘Nature Lifeless’, Whitehead discusses what he calls the ‘Hume-Newton situation’ as the ‘primary presupposition for all modern philosophic thought’ that results in what he considers an incoherence: ‘a dead nature can give no reasons’ (MT: 135). In ‘Nature Alive’, Whitehead discusses an alternative, speculative approach that reframes the presuppositions in a manner consistent with modern physics. See also McHenry 2015.
30. In separating ‘affects’ from ‘affections’ and ‘percepts’ from ‘perceptions’ we see the complicated dance with Kant, in which the noumenal becomes forceful – in which there is no transcendental unity of apperception, but in which the form of the transcendental argument still lingers (Grosz 2008).
31. Deleuze’s description of intensity as an infinitely doubling differential series (‘Every intensity is E-E’, where E itself refers to an e – e’, and e to ε – εʹ etc.’ (DR: 222)) closely follows his 1987 characterisation of Whitehead’s discussion of the event in Concept of Nature. He is interested in a characterisation of the event as an infinite series with no final term, but with a definite limit. The event would therefore have a qualitative characteristic (a vibratory harmonic) which cannot be exhausted in a single determination. See: http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=140&groupe=Leibniz&langue=1
32. The Latin terms (extensio and extensum) refer to the act or process of extension and its result. Deleuze uses extensité or extension intra for the former, and étendue for the latter. See Paul Patton’s note, DR: 329.
33. In Part III of the Ethics, Spinoza defines affectus as: ‘the affections of the body by which the power of activity is increased or diminished, assisted or checked, together with the ideas of these affections’ (Spinoza 1992: 103). Shirley (the source of the cited passage here) translates this as ‘emotion’; Curley as ‘affect’. The latter is preferable, since Spinoza’s definition does not locate affectus as entirely physical or mental, but rather insists on it functioning in both attributes. Deleuze and Guattari are interested in the way that affect involves a decrease or increase of power.
34. In Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze studies Bacon’s work as an expression of this dynamic. Bacon renders visible the forces acting on flesh. See also Smith 2012: 89–106.
35. Haecceity dates to Duns Scotus and is often translated as ‘thisness’ in contrast to quiddity or ‘whatness’. The latter refers to an essential form, whereas the former refers to particular individuality separate and distinct from the essence (Mautner 2005: 257, 512; https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-haecceity/). Deleuze’s and Guattari’s characterisation is in rhetorical tension with its metaphysics, since it risks reinstalling a substantialist model in referring to particles and molecules.
36. As Alliez observes, this reverses the typical order of priority following Kant: ‘The question is no longer that of the methodological dependence of the object in relation to the subject, but of the ontological auto-constitution of a new subject on the basis of its objects’ (2004: 56).
37. There are physiological limits as well: the ear can only register a limited bandwidth, the eye certain wavelengths, and so on. (But do we know, with certainty, how plastic these limits are, especially at their edges or perceived limits?)
38. In Chapter 6, I link this to psychologist Daniel Stern’s work in what he calls ‘vitality forms’.