The concept of prehension, as developed by Whitehead and celebrated by Hartshorne as perhaps the greatest generalization in philosophy, is at once evocative and elusive. It invites us to consider experience not as a passive reception of external impressions, nor as a sovereign act of a detached mind, but as a participatory entanglement in the ongoing genesis of reality. The world is not merely seen; it is felt forward, moment by moment, in an intricate latticework of relations.
This essay, with its deft tracing of prehension’s antecedents in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, does well to highlight the philosophical hesitations that kept the idea from emerging fully in prior centuries. Bacon’s distinction between perception and cognition was a step toward a more porous, living conception of reality, but the mechanistic tide of modern science swept such intimations away. Descartes, for all his ambitions, reabsorbed his own fleeting insights into a private and isolated mind, and so the “fatal gap” between symbol and reality was left yawning. Whitehead’s intervention is therefore not merely corrective but creative, not merely an epistemological revision but an ontological metamorphosis. He grants to all things—electrons, leaves, children, even God—a power of feeling, a primitive grasping of the world’s ceaseless flux.
To generalize experience so radically is a bold move, and one that brings Whitehead into dialogue with William James, who sought to dislodge psychology from the stultifying grip of rationalist abstraction. What James did for the mind, Whitehead does for the cosmos: he reawakens it to its own interiority, its own thick and layered being. But here we might pause to ask: Does this infusion of feeling into the very sinews of existence risk a kind of sentimentalism? If electrons feel, do they also suffer? If a leaf greens in the sun through prehension, does it experience loss when it falls? The problem of suffering, so often the hidden interlocutor of metaphysics, lingers at the edges of such a picture.
But this is not a criticism so much as an invitation to further thought. For the dissolution of the Cartesian divide, the intertwining of mind and world, is no small thing. To read prehension as merely a metaphor, a poetic flourish, would be to miss its deeper claim: that all knowing is a form of intimacy, and all existence a continual becoming. Perhaps, then, what Whitehead offers is less an argument to be won than a vision to be inhabited—a way of seeing the world not as a lifeless inventory of facts but as a tapestry of mutual concern.
If so, what does this demand of us? If reality is, in some sense, alive, how shall we live within it? The implications extend beyond philosophy and into ethics, art, even politics. We are called not to observe, but to participate. And if we are, at root, conjoined by feeling, then our task is not mere comprehension but compassion—prehension in its highest form.
"Feelings that were once in the stone-society are transmitted through routes of inheritance in my organism to be felt by me. My bodily cellular-society transmutes the feelings of the stone-society in various ways relevant to my life as a conscious animal. I experience not unmediated stone feelings but human feelings of stone feelings, channeled through the sense organs unique to our species. Nonetheless, there is no ontological gap between the molecular agitations composing the stone and those composing my retinas, neurons, and skin."
Is that the resonance/attunement of two string instruments via the medium of airwaves from one to the other, or is that exactly what you're preempting?
"Whitehead’s introduction of God is not a matter of religious worship but a philosophical attempt to make good on the ontological principle: that every potential has to be prehended by an actual entity, even those not yet realized in the physical world. For Whitehead, God, or the everlasting macrocosmic concrescence, performs precisely this function. But the theological ingredient in Whitehead’s metaphysics need not be read as identical with classical theism. The process God is not to be treated as a ruling Caesar or ruthless moralist, but as an ideal lure toward future harmonies uniquely tailored to the local spatiotemporal condition of each occasion."
Is there any reason why you don't use the "colloquial" term Cosmic Consciousness, that is, from the "perspective" of That Which Is greater than the sum total of all individual consciousnesses throughout Existence (and not from the human perspective of tapping into it)?
"Prehension clarifies how past actualities condition the present while still leaving room for novelty. It threads the needle allowing physical inheritance and conceptual imagination to be coherently woven together. "
I am really struggling with the "how" in this proposition. I've read about prehension and it always strikes me as more of a word game than a theory -- like a Zen Koan. In your essay there are loads of claims made about what prehension is supposed to do, but it reads to me like "prehension does everything" or "is everything".
I want to say that its a kind of God of the Gaps by another name. Even though "God" is placed in the equation by Whitehead, it would seem that prehension is the God beyond God (to put in in a Jungian way).
And while it is fair enough to put a name to the ineffible, it seems you're also claiming that something has been effed, that a "how" is being revealed. But I don't find any explanatory power here beyond a similar claim like "God makes all possible". Fine. But "how"?
Maybe you can set me straight. Or maybe you can confirm my intuition. I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your claim to "how", or simply unable to find that "how" in the text.
It is a fair criticism. The "how" of prehension is not anywhere to be found in the text, which is my admittedly inadequate attempt to convey the "what," ie, its philosophical significance. It is a bit like a Zen koan, specifically the one about the finger pointing at the Moon.
Whitehead says philosophers have been obsessed with their visual feelings and have scorned their visceral feelings. Our theories of causality and perception have suffered gravely as a result. Even so, the "how" might still be found in the way your retinas are absorbing the pixilated light from your screen, your optic nerve and visual cortex channeling that energy in complex ways before it spills out somewhere in the interstices of your brain into the occasion of your conscious comprehension (or incomprehension, as the case may be). Prehension is the word for the transmission process going on before and beneath our conscious awareness. And ultimately our conscious awareness is yet another example of it, a variety of it especially good at obscuring its own conditions of genesis.
Whitehead certainly does a better job on the explanatory details in his Part II of Process and Reality on "The Theory of Prehensions."
Are you familiar with the work of Eugene Gendlin (especially “A Process Model” and “Focusing”)? His notion of the “implicit” is very much related to Whitehead’s “prehension,” except with a more practical bent. Gendlin discusses having a “felt sense” of the implicit/prehension wherein the individual learns to consciously participate in the co-creative carrying forward of life.
Gendlin’s “focusing” could be a very practical means for working with the prehensions in one’s life—bringing them into awareness and consciously integrating them into meaningful change or creative insight. It would allow individuals to step into a process that Whitehead describes philosophically, but in a way that is directly applicable to personal experience and transformation.
Sergey Petoukhov is a Russian scientist who has done extensive research exploring the connections between mathematical sequences, ancient symbols and psychological archetypes (eternal objects) and genetic structures. His speculative but extensive mathematical work delves into the intricate relationships between the Fibonacci and Lucas sequences, as related to the binary nature of the hexagrams of the I Ching, Jung's understanding of polarity in archetypal patterns as well as DNA patterns. He examines how these sequences, fundamental in mathematics manifest themselves in biological systems.
I have always been fascinated how the ubiquity of spiral patterns in nature points to an underlying order as a meta-pattern in the natural world (galaxies, hurricanes, flowers, seashells, DNA, etc). Perhaps, however, one of the best visual examples of prehension comes from the seashells of the Family: Xenophoria. These 30 or so carrier shell species complete their growth pattern as they attach (prehend) various objects on the ocean floor to the growing spirals of the mollusks' exoskeleton.
This is an excellent essay. As to shortening it I can only wish you luck. Perhaps the historical "wrapping" (Bacon, Decartes) would be more requisite for an academic philosophy glossary than one for a book on art, and thus could go?)
One specific element you state both eloquently and boldly is that "prehension operates at every scale" - and with such wide-ranging examples as the electron spinning and the child grokking mom's face.
The question I have on this: Is the implication of symmetric and bi-directional scale-independent prehension generally understood to be Whitehead's framing? I had always thought that he introduced an asymmetry in asserting that an Actual Occasion could prehend a collective (via Transmutation), but seemingly denying the reverse capacity of prehension to his collectives (nexus, societies) - in that these are not Actual Occasions.
This leads to (seemingly unresolved) questions about whether macroscopic actual occasions are part of the scheme envisioned by ANW. Though they come into the text of P&R (regnant occasions, Hannibal) and commentators like Wallach extend to an extreme but I had come to conclude that there was no well-argued casting of the scheme to incorporate the non-miniature.
I only ask more for my own clarification than to suggest you elaborate on this in the essay!
Thanks for the pointer to the Hartshorne piece and also for your discussion of this with Tim.
Did it seem like I was implying bi-directionality of prehension? I was arguing for what I take to be Whitehead's view, which is of an asymmetrical relation. You are right that societies do not prehend, only actual occasions. Though we may sometimes speak in shorthand about dominant occasions within societies (eg, the mother-child example).
I do not know why anyone ever got the impression that Whitehead intended actual occasions to only describe the microscale. The description of concrescence is meant to be generic enough to apply at any scale.
Ach... my use of the term "bi-directional" was wildly ill-chosen. I believe I was tripping over my own appreciation of the relational and bi-directional implications of the mother-child gaze you mentioned.
But you are astute to realize that what my query aimed at was this business of macroscale Actual Occasions.
It is a real challenge to characterize of these "dominant" or "regnant" occasions in Whitehead's scheme (and a paucity of consideration in the literature that I have found). The degree to which these Actual Occasions have any meaningful "physical" pole seems problematic. Also, it is one thing to speculate on the feelings of the miniature and to agree that such Actual Occasions do, in their satisfactions, actually bring into being quanta of spacetime. But how would this final element of concrescence manifest in the dominant occasion of that child or that other?
Levin's work seems more and more to be tilting my mental model of things away from hierarchies of dominance or regency and toward fluid relational webs stewing in fields of potentiality !
I know I’ve mentioned it before, Matthew, but I must say it again: there is so much to be gleaned by placing Whitehead’s work, especially regarding “prehension,” alongside Gendlin’s concept of the “implicit” as discussed in “A Process Model” and its practical application detailed in “Focusing.” Bringing the two together and taking them both further would be an extremely fruitful endeavor.
"(including our knowledge of it) as a nexus feelings." The indefinite article here suggests the singular feeling, doesn't it--unless "of" was omitted; is that what you intended?
It is an awkward phrasing stemming from the paradox that the nexus is both one and many (one continuum of possibility relating many individual feelers). I think I will remove "of it" from the parenthetical. Thanks for poking this!
The concept of prehension, as developed by Whitehead and celebrated by Hartshorne as perhaps the greatest generalization in philosophy, is at once evocative and elusive. It invites us to consider experience not as a passive reception of external impressions, nor as a sovereign act of a detached mind, but as a participatory entanglement in the ongoing genesis of reality. The world is not merely seen; it is felt forward, moment by moment, in an intricate latticework of relations.
This essay, with its deft tracing of prehension’s antecedents in Bacon, Descartes, and Locke, does well to highlight the philosophical hesitations that kept the idea from emerging fully in prior centuries. Bacon’s distinction between perception and cognition was a step toward a more porous, living conception of reality, but the mechanistic tide of modern science swept such intimations away. Descartes, for all his ambitions, reabsorbed his own fleeting insights into a private and isolated mind, and so the “fatal gap” between symbol and reality was left yawning. Whitehead’s intervention is therefore not merely corrective but creative, not merely an epistemological revision but an ontological metamorphosis. He grants to all things—electrons, leaves, children, even God—a power of feeling, a primitive grasping of the world’s ceaseless flux.
To generalize experience so radically is a bold move, and one that brings Whitehead into dialogue with William James, who sought to dislodge psychology from the stultifying grip of rationalist abstraction. What James did for the mind, Whitehead does for the cosmos: he reawakens it to its own interiority, its own thick and layered being. But here we might pause to ask: Does this infusion of feeling into the very sinews of existence risk a kind of sentimentalism? If electrons feel, do they also suffer? If a leaf greens in the sun through prehension, does it experience loss when it falls? The problem of suffering, so often the hidden interlocutor of metaphysics, lingers at the edges of such a picture.
But this is not a criticism so much as an invitation to further thought. For the dissolution of the Cartesian divide, the intertwining of mind and world, is no small thing. To read prehension as merely a metaphor, a poetic flourish, would be to miss its deeper claim: that all knowing is a form of intimacy, and all existence a continual becoming. Perhaps, then, what Whitehead offers is less an argument to be won than a vision to be inhabited—a way of seeing the world not as a lifeless inventory of facts but as a tapestry of mutual concern.
If so, what does this demand of us? If reality is, in some sense, alive, how shall we live within it? The implications extend beyond philosophy and into ethics, art, even politics. We are called not to observe, but to participate. And if we are, at root, conjoined by feeling, then our task is not mere comprehension but compassion—prehension in its highest form.
Thank you I really enjoyed your concise explanation.
I'm reading this on my phone under a mosquito net in the jungle after a nightlong ayahuasca ceremony and it is SO fucking good. Thanks, Matt.
"Feelings that were once in the stone-society are transmitted through routes of inheritance in my organism to be felt by me. My bodily cellular-society transmutes the feelings of the stone-society in various ways relevant to my life as a conscious animal. I experience not unmediated stone feelings but human feelings of stone feelings, channeled through the sense organs unique to our species. Nonetheless, there is no ontological gap between the molecular agitations composing the stone and those composing my retinas, neurons, and skin."
Is that the resonance/attunement of two string instruments via the medium of airwaves from one to the other, or is that exactly what you're preempting?
"Whitehead’s introduction of God is not a matter of religious worship but a philosophical attempt to make good on the ontological principle: that every potential has to be prehended by an actual entity, even those not yet realized in the physical world. For Whitehead, God, or the everlasting macrocosmic concrescence, performs precisely this function. But the theological ingredient in Whitehead’s metaphysics need not be read as identical with classical theism. The process God is not to be treated as a ruling Caesar or ruthless moralist, but as an ideal lure toward future harmonies uniquely tailored to the local spatiotemporal condition of each occasion."
Is there any reason why you don't use the "colloquial" term Cosmic Consciousness, that is, from the "perspective" of That Which Is greater than the sum total of all individual consciousnesses throughout Existence (and not from the human perspective of tapping into it)?
"Prehension clarifies how past actualities condition the present while still leaving room for novelty. It threads the needle allowing physical inheritance and conceptual imagination to be coherently woven together. "
I am really struggling with the "how" in this proposition. I've read about prehension and it always strikes me as more of a word game than a theory -- like a Zen Koan. In your essay there are loads of claims made about what prehension is supposed to do, but it reads to me like "prehension does everything" or "is everything".
I want to say that its a kind of God of the Gaps by another name. Even though "God" is placed in the equation by Whitehead, it would seem that prehension is the God beyond God (to put in in a Jungian way).
And while it is fair enough to put a name to the ineffible, it seems you're also claiming that something has been effed, that a "how" is being revealed. But I don't find any explanatory power here beyond a similar claim like "God makes all possible". Fine. But "how"?
Maybe you can set me straight. Or maybe you can confirm my intuition. I'm not sure if I'm misunderstanding your claim to "how", or simply unable to find that "how" in the text.
It is a fair criticism. The "how" of prehension is not anywhere to be found in the text, which is my admittedly inadequate attempt to convey the "what," ie, its philosophical significance. It is a bit like a Zen koan, specifically the one about the finger pointing at the Moon.
Whitehead says philosophers have been obsessed with their visual feelings and have scorned their visceral feelings. Our theories of causality and perception have suffered gravely as a result. Even so, the "how" might still be found in the way your retinas are absorbing the pixilated light from your screen, your optic nerve and visual cortex channeling that energy in complex ways before it spills out somewhere in the interstices of your brain into the occasion of your conscious comprehension (or incomprehension, as the case may be). Prehension is the word for the transmission process going on before and beneath our conscious awareness. And ultimately our conscious awareness is yet another example of it, a variety of it especially good at obscuring its own conditions of genesis.
Whitehead certainly does a better job on the explanatory details in his Part II of Process and Reality on "The Theory of Prehensions."
I will check out that source material then. Thank you!
Are you familiar with the work of Eugene Gendlin (especially “A Process Model” and “Focusing”)? His notion of the “implicit” is very much related to Whitehead’s “prehension,” except with a more practical bent. Gendlin discusses having a “felt sense” of the implicit/prehension wherein the individual learns to consciously participate in the co-creative carrying forward of life.
Gendlin’s “focusing” could be a very practical means for working with the prehensions in one’s life—bringing them into awareness and consciously integrating them into meaningful change or creative insight. It would allow individuals to step into a process that Whitehead describes philosophically, but in a way that is directly applicable to personal experience and transformation.
Sergey Petoukhov is a Russian scientist who has done extensive research exploring the connections between mathematical sequences, ancient symbols and psychological archetypes (eternal objects) and genetic structures. His speculative but extensive mathematical work delves into the intricate relationships between the Fibonacci and Lucas sequences, as related to the binary nature of the hexagrams of the I Ching, Jung's understanding of polarity in archetypal patterns as well as DNA patterns. He examines how these sequences, fundamental in mathematics manifest themselves in biological systems.
I have always been fascinated how the ubiquity of spiral patterns in nature points to an underlying order as a meta-pattern in the natural world (galaxies, hurricanes, flowers, seashells, DNA, etc). Perhaps, however, one of the best visual examples of prehension comes from the seashells of the Family: Xenophoria. These 30 or so carrier shell species complete their growth pattern as they attach (prehend) various objects on the ocean floor to the growing spirals of the mollusks' exoskeleton.
I Feel it, but I’m still not there yet. But, I’m well on the way.
This is an excellent essay. As to shortening it I can only wish you luck. Perhaps the historical "wrapping" (Bacon, Decartes) would be more requisite for an academic philosophy glossary than one for a book on art, and thus could go?)
One specific element you state both eloquently and boldly is that "prehension operates at every scale" - and with such wide-ranging examples as the electron spinning and the child grokking mom's face.
The question I have on this: Is the implication of symmetric and bi-directional scale-independent prehension generally understood to be Whitehead's framing? I had always thought that he introduced an asymmetry in asserting that an Actual Occasion could prehend a collective (via Transmutation), but seemingly denying the reverse capacity of prehension to his collectives (nexus, societies) - in that these are not Actual Occasions.
This leads to (seemingly unresolved) questions about whether macroscopic actual occasions are part of the scheme envisioned by ANW. Though they come into the text of P&R (regnant occasions, Hannibal) and commentators like Wallach extend to an extreme but I had come to conclude that there was no well-argued casting of the scheme to incorporate the non-miniature.
I only ask more for my own clarification than to suggest you elaborate on this in the essay!
Thanks for the pointer to the Hartshorne piece and also for your discussion of this with Tim.
D>
Thanks, D.
Did it seem like I was implying bi-directionality of prehension? I was arguing for what I take to be Whitehead's view, which is of an asymmetrical relation. You are right that societies do not prehend, only actual occasions. Though we may sometimes speak in shorthand about dominant occasions within societies (eg, the mother-child example).
I do not know why anyone ever got the impression that Whitehead intended actual occasions to only describe the microscale. The description of concrescence is meant to be generic enough to apply at any scale.
Ach... my use of the term "bi-directional" was wildly ill-chosen. I believe I was tripping over my own appreciation of the relational and bi-directional implications of the mother-child gaze you mentioned.
But you are astute to realize that what my query aimed at was this business of macroscale Actual Occasions.
It is a real challenge to characterize of these "dominant" or "regnant" occasions in Whitehead's scheme (and a paucity of consideration in the literature that I have found). The degree to which these Actual Occasions have any meaningful "physical" pole seems problematic. Also, it is one thing to speculate on the feelings of the miniature and to agree that such Actual Occasions do, in their satisfactions, actually bring into being quanta of spacetime. But how would this final element of concrescence manifest in the dominant occasion of that child or that other?
Levin's work seems more and more to be tilting my mental model of things away from hierarchies of dominance or regency and toward fluid relational webs stewing in fields of potentiality !
Well done!
I know I’ve mentioned it before, Matthew, but I must say it again: there is so much to be gleaned by placing Whitehead’s work, especially regarding “prehension,” alongside Gendlin’s concept of the “implicit” as discussed in “A Process Model” and its practical application detailed in “Focusing.” Bringing the two together and taking them both further would be an extremely fruitful endeavor.
"(including our knowledge of it) as a nexus feelings." The indefinite article here suggests the singular feeling, doesn't it--unless "of" was omitted; is that what you intended?
It is an awkward phrasing stemming from the paradox that the nexus is both one and many (one continuum of possibility relating many individual feelers). I think I will remove "of it" from the parenthetical. Thanks for poking this!