1Whitehead on Causality and Perception
Steven Shaviro

Whitehead discusses symbolism – among other reasons – in order to
get a handle on the problem of error. This, of course, is somethingthat has preoccupied Western philosophy for a long time. Descartes'
Meditations on First Philosophy begins with his worries about ‘how
numerous were the false opinions that in my youth I had taken to betrue, and how doubtful were all those that I had subsequently built
upon them’.1 Whitehead's erstwhile collaborator Bertrand Russell
similarly opens his volume The Problems of Philosophy with thequestion: ‘Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain thatno reasonable man could doubt it?’2 Modern Western philosophy –from Descartes through to Kant and on to today – generally privileges
epistemology over ontology. We cannot claim to know the way things
are without first giving an account of how it is that we know. We
cannot consider the consequences of a proposition until we have firstassured ourselves that it is free from error.
Whitehead gives his own deceptively bland statement of the
problem of truth and error towards the beginning of Symbolism:‘An adequate account of human mentality requires an explanationof (i) how we can know truly, (ii) how we can err, and (iii) how we
can critically distinguish truth from error’ (S 7). Despite this un­
exceptionable goal, however, Whitehead does not seem to think thatthe problem of error is of great importance. Indeed, he takes whatmost philosophers would consider a cavalier, indeed irresponsible,
attitude towards the whole question. For he holds that ‘in the realworld it is more important that a proposition be interesting than thatit be true’ (PR 259). A scientific observation, a common-sense hypoth­esis, or even a rigorous philosophical formulation may have relevant
and important consequences despite the fact that it is erroneous. For
this reason, Whitehead is less concerned with eliminating error than
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14  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
with experimenting with it, and seeing what might arise from it. Error
is not an evil to be exterminated, but a frequently useful ‘lure forfeeling’ (PR 25 and passim). It is a productive detour in the pathwaysof mental life: ‘We must not, however, judge too severely of error. In
the initial stages of mental progress, error in symbolic reference is thediscipline which promotes imaginative freedom’ (S 19).
It is worth underlining how rare this position is in Western philoso­phy. It may well be a cliché of educational method (a subject in which
Whitehead himself was deeply interested) that making mistakes is anecessary part of learning. But most philosophers overlook this. They
are more concerned with the nature and content of truth than they arewith the question of how we may learn to attain it. Deleuze is the only
other major philosopher I know who joins Whitehead in regarding the
problem of error as in itself merely trivial.3
Western philosophy in general is preoccupied with the questionof error because it is deeply concerned with the unreliability of im­mediate experience – or of the body and the senses. From Plato's
allegory of the cave, through Descartes' radical doubt about theevidence provided by his physical organs, right on up to Thomas
Metzinger's claim that experience is nothing but an internal, virtualreality simulation, philosophers have been haunted by the idea thatsense-perception is delusional – and that, as a result, our beliefs about
the world might well be radically wrong.
Even if we trust the evidence of our senses, however, we may still
be severely limited in the extent of what we can actually know. Humeis sceptical, not so much of the deliverances of the senses themselves,
as of what we can legitimately infer from them. For Hume, ‘all events
seem entirely loose and separate. One event follows another; but
we never can observe any tie between them. They seem conjoined
but never connected.’4 It is true that we often observe the ‘constantconjunction’ of certain events. But correlation is not causation, andwe cannot legitimately infer from the former to the latter. Hume con­cludes that the ‘idea of a necessary connexion among events’ arises
only because ‘the mind is carried by habit’ to expect a second, associ­ated event when it encounters the first.5
Kant, of course, endeavours to overcome Hume's scepticism bymeans of a transcendental argument. We cannot do without caus­
ality. If relations of cause and effect cannot be found in sense-data
themselves, as Hume maintains, then they must inhere in ‘our waysof thought about the data’ (S 37). For Kant, causality is rescued
as an a priori category of understanding. If we were not able tosymbolism ch-1.indd 14

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  15organise the sense-data we receive according to the laws of cause andeffect, Kant says, then we would scarcely be able to have subjectiveex­perience at all.
Recent philosophy most often treats causality in a Humean spirit,rather than a Kantian one. Thus the late analytic philosopher David
Lewis maintains that ‘all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local
matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another’.6
Relations of cause and effect may be observed to supervene uponthese particular facts; but Lewis argues, following Hume, that wecannot make any inference from such observations to a deeper sort ofnecessity. For we can always imagine, without logical contradiction,
counterfactual possible worlds in which events could have turned out
differently. Analytic philosophers love to float scenarios in which, forinstance, water is not H2O,7 or people devoid of sentience nonethelessact in ways that are indistinguishable from everyone else.8 Indeed,
Lewis's ‘modal realism’ asserts that we must accept the reality of allthese alternative possible worlds.
As Jeffrey Bell has noted,9 there is a certain similarity between
Lewis's doctrine of Humean supervenience and the revival, by the
speculative realist philosopher Quentin Meillassoux, of what he calls‘Hume's Problem’.10 For Meillassoux, Hume establishes once andfor all that neither experience (which pertains only to the past andpresent, never to the future) nor a priori reasoning (which can only
exclude logical contradictions) is able to guarantee the necessity of
causal relations. For ‘there is nothing contradictory in thinking thatthe same causes could produce different effects tomorrow’.11 If theprospect of arbitrary change is not impossible, Meillassoux argues,
then it cannot be excluded from the world as it is. Where Lewis affirms
the reality of all possible worlds, Meillassoux argues for ‘the absolutenecessity of contingency’, or of sheer ungrounded possibility, in ourown world.12
Hume and Kant alike, as well as their followers, share what White­head calls the ‘naïve presupposition of “simple occurrence” for themere data’ – or better, of ‘simple location’, since it applies ‘to space
as well as to time’ (S 38). It little matters for Whitehead, therefore,
whether ‘causal efficacy’ is defined with Hume as ‘a habit of thought’or with Kant as ‘a category of thought’ (S 39–40). In both cases, re­lations and forms of organisation are abstracted away from the matrixof things themselves, and attributed only to the mind that observes
these things. ‘Both schools find “causal efficacy” to be the importation,
into the data, of a way of thinking or judging about those data’ (S 39).

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16  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
Whitehead, however, rejects the presuppositions that underlie
this whole history of argument. For Whitehead denies that events inthemselves are ever merely ‘loose and separate’, or that the world canbe reduced to ‘local matters of particular fact’. In the actual world, hesays, ‘there is nothing which “simply happens”’ (S 38). There are no
isolated data, because in every act of experience ‘the datum includes
its own interconnections’ already (PR 113). In order to explain how
this works, Whitehead distinguishes between two separate modesof perceptive experience: presentational immediacy and causal
efficacy. These two modes, together with the ways that they are fusedin symbolic reference, form the main subject of Symbolism. The
distinction between these two modes is further elaborated in Process
and Reality.
Presentational immediacy roughly corresponds to Descartes' ‘clear
and distinct perceptions’, Hume's ‘impressions’ and Kant's ‘sensible
intuitions’. Whitehead defines it as ‘our immediate perception of
the contemporary external world’, an appearance ‘effected by the
mediation of qualities, such as colours, sounds, tastes, etc.’ (S 21).
Presentational immediacy is the great source of sensuous richness. But
it provides us only with clearly demarcated representations, and it isconfined to the present moment, without any thickness of duration.
For these reasons, presentational immediacy is severely limited inwhat it reveals of the world. As Whitehead says, presentational im­
mediacy is ‘vivid, precise, and barren’ (S 23). It ‘displays a worldconcealed under an adventitious show, a show of our own bodily
production’ (S 44). But for this very reason, it leaves us with a hollow
sense of depthless mere appearances. This is the root of philosophicalscepticism, in Hume and throughout modernity.
According to Whitehead, the problem with standard philosophi­
cal accounts of perception is that these accounts are concerned onlywith presentational immediacy. They entirely ignore other modes ofexperience. They take it for granted that our empirical experience islimited to individual sense impressions, or to the ‘local matters ofparticular fact’ that correspond to these impressions. This assump­tion is what allows Hume to argue that objects are nothing morethan hypothetical bundles of qualities. It is also what drives Kant toconclude that only the mind can bring order to what would otherwise
be a chaos of unrelated impressions.
Whitehead, however, suggests that Hume and Kant do not evengive presentational immediacy its proper due. For he insists that, evenif we restrict ourselves to just this mode of perception, ‘the worldsymbolism ch-1.indd 16

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  17

discloses itself to be a community of actual things, which are actualin the same sense as we are’ (S 21). When we are looking at a wall, forinstance, ‘our perception is not confined to universal characters; we
do not perceive disembodied colour or disembodied extensiveness: weperceive the wall's colour and extensiveness’ (S 15, original emphasis).
Contrary to the empiricist assumption of separate, atomistic qualia,
in fact ‘there are no bare sensations which are first experienced andthen “projected” into our feet as their feelings, or onto the opposite
wall as its colour’ (S 14). The supposedly atomistic, qualitative sensedata are not initially isolated from one another. Rather, Whiteheadsays, such qualities ‘can be thus isolated only by abstracting themfrom their implication in the scheme of spatial relatedness of theperceived things to each other and to the perceiving subject … thesense-data are generic abstractions’ (S 22).
It is worth noting that Graham Harman, with his object-oriented
ontology, also opposes what he describes as ‘the widespread em­
piricist view that the supposed objects of experience are nothing but
bundles of qualities’. Harman rather insists that qualities are neverisolable, but always ‘bonded to the thing to which they belong’.13
Harman attributes this point to Husserl, for whom an ‘intentional
object’ is not the sum of its adumbrations, but always more than its
multiple aspects or qualities.14 ‘According to Husserl we en­counterthe intentional object directly in experience from the start’; it does
not have to be ‘built up as a bundle of perceptually discrete shapes
and colors, or even from tiny pixels of sense experience woven
together by habit’.15
My reason for mentioning this is that Whitehead makes the same
distinction as Husserl does – at least according to Harman's readingof Husserl. Whitehead most likely makes this point without having
encountered it in Husserl. It is true that Whitehead had students –most notably Charles Hartshorne – who had also studied with Husserl
and were familiar with his writings. But I do not see any evidence for
Husserl's influence upon Whitehead, even when – as here – they cometo parallel conclusions.
Be that as it may, for Whitehead the major defect in mainstream
philosophical accounts of perception is that they leave out any consid­
eration of causal efficacy. The physical sciences, on the other hand, arepredominantly concerned with causal efficacy, but they treat it only
as an objectified process, comprehended by a ‘view from nowhere’.
In this way, the split between presentational immediacy and causal
efficacy is a prime instance of what Whitehead calls the bifurcation

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18  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
of nature (CN 26–48). The scientists, no less than the philosophers,
neglect causal efficacy as a form of perception, or as a mode ofexperience. It is only by treating causal efficacy experientially, andunder­standing how it becomes entwined with presentational immedi­
acy in the opera­tions of symbolic reference that we can overcome theopposition between phenomenology and natural science, or between‘the nature apprehended in awareness and the nature which is thecause of awareness’ (CN 31).
Whitehead goes to great lengths in Symbolism to argue not onlythat causal efficacy is a mode of perception, but also that it is themost primordial mode of perception, far deeper than presentational
immediacy. The latter ‘is only of importance in high-grade organ­isms’ (S 16). But ‘the direct perception of causal efficacy’ operates
everywhere (S 39). For it involves ‘the overwhelming conformationof fact, in present action, to antecedent settled fact’ (S 41). Indeed,Whitehead says, ‘the perception of conformation to realities in theenvironment is the primitive element in our external experience. We
conform to our bodily organs and to the vague world which lies
beyond them’ (S 43).
Without this conformation of the present to the past, this physicalexperience of causal efficacy, the clarities and intensities of presenta­
tional immediacy could not even arise for us in the first place. Even
our most clear and distinct perceptions are grounded in a deeper sensethat is ‘vague, haunting, unmanageable’ (S 43). Our very awarenessof sharp and delicious sensations, and our ability to make subtle
discriminations among them – what Whitehead describes as our ‘selfenjoyment derived from the immediacy of the show of things’ – areunderwritten and made possible by ‘the perception of the pressure
from a world of things with characters in their own right, characters
mysteriously moulding our own natures’ (S 44). A heavy otherness
insinuates itself into even our clearest and most distinct perceptions,which is why there can be no ‘solipsism of the present moment’ (S 29).
This massive underlying pressure of causal efficacy is also what
produces and accounts for our apprehension of things as more thanjust bundles of qualities:
these primitive emotions are accompanied by the clearest recognitionof other actual things reacting upon ourselves. The vulgar obviousnessof such recognition is equal to the vulgar obviousness produced by thefunctioning of any one of our five senses. When we hate, it is a manthat we hate and not a collection of sense-data – a causal, efficaciousman. (S 45)

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  19

The vagueness of the emotional experience of causal efficacy does
not prevent, but rather actually calls forth, an awareness that things
actually do exist outside us and apart from us. In other words, ‘weencounter the … object directly in experience from the start’, asHarman insists, rather than building up a representation of the object
from a bundle of separate sense impressions. My direct experience ofthe object in the mode of causal efficacy subtends my identification of
it in the mode of presentational immediacy. And it is only by abstract­
ing away from causal efficacy, with its ‘overwhelming conformation offact, in present action, to antecedent settled fact’ (S 41), that we canenjoy the subtle and disinterested aesthetic pleasures of presentational
immediacy.
This is why, following Whitehead, I dissent from Harman's insist­ence that ‘real objects cannot touch’,16 and that causation can only be‘vicarious’.17 For this is the case only from the viewpoint of presen­tational immediacy. In causal efficacy, objects do literally touch one
another. This immediacy of touch follows directly from ‘the principleof conformation, whereby what is already made becomes a determin­
ant of what is in the making.… The present fact is luminously theoutcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago’ (S 46).
The principle of conformation applies equally to my own continuity
with whom I was a quarter of a second ago, and to my contact withthings that have impinged upon me in the past quarter second.
Harman worries that all distinction would be lost if actual contact
were possible. He argues that the idea ‘of indirect-but-partial contact
cannot work.… Direct contact could only be all or nothing’.18
Harman's problem is to maintain separation at the same time thathe accounts for causal influence. As Harman puts it, even when fireburns cotton, there is no direct contact between these two entities.
The fire may well obliterate the cotton, with no remainder. But eventhen, Harman says, ‘fire does not interact at all’ with such qualities
as ‘the cotton's odor or color’.19 Therefore fire and cotton remain
onto­logically separate, in accordance with Harman's dictum that ‘theobject is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum’.20
Now, Isabelle Stengers insists that Whitehead always works as amathematician, even when he is engaged in philosophical speculation.
Whitehead does not posit absolute principles; rather, he always con­
fronts specific problems, by producing a construction that observes all‘the constraints that the solution will have to satisfy’.21 In this sense,
Whitehead's distinction between presentational immediacy and causal
efficacy is itself constructed as a way to resolve the problem of error

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20  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
and the scepticism about causality that are found in the Humean andKantian traditions.
I would like to suggest that, in this way, Whitehead offers a con­struction that resolves what I have just called Harman's problem. He
argues that, at one and the same time, ‘actual things are objectively
in our experience and formally existing in their own completeness …
no actual thing is “objectified” in its “formal” completeness’ (S 25–6).
This allows him to assert both:
1. that things actually do enter into direct contact with other things,
as they partially determine the composition of those other things;
and
2. that no particular thing is entirely subsumed, either by the otherthings that entered into it and helped to determine its own compo­
sition, nor by the other things into which it subsequently enters.
In this way, Whitehead's construction satisfies – ahead of time – all
the conditions of Harman's problem, without accepting Harman's
vision of objects as inviolable substances. I will note as well thatWhitehead's reappropriation of the old scholastic distinction between‘formal’ and ‘objective’ existence has an affinity with Tristan Garcia's
version of object-oriented philosophy, according to which a thing isdefined as the difference between ‘that which is in a thing and that inwhich a thing is, or that which it comprehends and that which com­prehends it’.22 Garcia, like Whitehead, refuses to explain away causal
efficacy, while at the same time recognising what Whitehead calls ‘thevast causal independence of contemporary occasions’ which ‘is thepreservative of elbow-room within the Universe. It provides each actu­
ality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility’ (AI 195).
The larger point here is that causal efficacy is at one and the sametime a mode of perception and an actual physical process. It encom­
passes both ‘the perceived redness and warmth of the fire’ and ‘theagitated molecules of carbon and oxygen … the radiant energy fromthem, and … the various functionings of the material body’ (CN 32).
In this double functioning, causal efficacy is irreducible to rigid deter­
minism, but also impregnable to philosophical scepticism.
Whitehead notes, for instance, that Hume's own presupposi­tions contradict his assertion that causal efficacy cannot be directly
perceived:
Hume with the clarity of genius states the fundamental point, thatsense-data functioning in an act of experience demonstrate that they

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  21
are given by the causal efficacy of actual bodily organs. He refers tothis causal efficacy as a component in direct perception. (S 51, originalemphasis)That is to say, by Hume's own prior admission we get direct acquaint­
ance with the world through the actions of the body.
In asserting the lack of perception of causality, [Hume] implicitly pre­supposes it.… His argument presupposes that sense-data, functioning
in presentational immediacy, are ‘given’ by reason of ‘eyes’, ‘ears’,‘palates’ functioning in causal efficacy. (S 51)

More generally, Whitehead says,
we see the picture, and we see it with our eyes; we touch the wood, andwe touch it with our hands; we smell the rose, and we smell it with ournose; we hear the bell, and we hear it with our ears; we taste the sugar,
and we taste it with our palate. (S 50)

The functioning here of experience in the mode of causal efficacy isantecedent to, and necessary for, the very experience in the mode ofpresentational immediacy within which, Hume says, no causation canbe discerned.
Whitehead recapitulates and expands this critique of Hume inProcess and Reality. Hume argues that our expectation that a certain
effect will follow a cause is merely a product of habit. But Whitehead
notes that
it is difficult to understand why Hume exempts 'habit' from the same
criticism as that applied to the notion of ‘cause’. We have no ‘impres­sion’ of ‘habit’, just as we have no ‘impression’ of ‘cause’. Cause,
repetition, habit are all in the same boat. (PR 140)

Once again, Hume presupposes the power of causal efficacy in hisvery attempt to explain it away.
I am tempted to describe Whitehead's mode of argument here asa precise inversion of Kant's. Kant opposes Hume by insisting that
we cannot, in principle, escape causality, because it must be imposedtranscendentally from above. Whitehead instead opposes Hume byobserving that, in point of fact, we do not escape causality because
it is always already at work empirically, from below. Whitehead turns
Kant around and puts him on his feet, we might say, in the same waythat Marx put Hegel on his feet.
Whitehead shows that causal efficacy is always already at work in
our perception, as a physical functioning of the bodily organs. Thissymbolism ch-1.indd 21

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22  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
would remain the case even if we were brains in vats, getting delusive
sense impressions by means of direct stimulation of the neurons. The
actual physical functioning of causal efficacy must still be pre­supposed,even if the picture presented through presentational immediacy does
not correspond to an actual state of affairs in the world.
This is why Whitehead says that ‘direct experience’ in itself ‘isinfallible’. This assertion is in fact a tautology: ‘what you have ex­perienced, you have experienced’ (S 6). The delusion of a brain in vats,
like the delusion exhibited in ‘Aesop's fable of the dog who dropped apiece of meat to grasp at its reflection in the water’ (S 19), is a failureof symbolic reference, rather than of direct experience in itself. It
results not from any defect of perception per se but from the way inwhich ‘the various actualities disclosed respectively by the two modes
are either identified, or are at least correlated together as interrelated
elements in our environment’ (S 18).
In other words, the dog's error is a mistake of interpretation, or a
failure to respect the limits of abstraction. Whitehead tells us that wecannot live without making abstractions, even though we go wrong
when we take our abstractions too seriously, or push them beyond
the limits within which they are useful. This is what Whitehead
famously calls ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ (S 39); we find it
at work not just in a dog's misjudgement, but also in the most refinedexamples of philosophical reasoning. It is not the perception of meatin the water that is at fault, but rather the dog's failure to understandthat this meat – which he truly perceived – is a reflection rather thanan edible substance. This is why Whitehead remains so relaxed in his
treatment of error: ‘Aesop's dog lost his meat, but he gained a step on
the road towards a free imagination’ (S 19).
We experience causal efficacy not only because we are bodies,but also because we feel, and subsist within, the passage of time.
Whitehead argues that Hume's sceptical conclusions ‘rest upon an
extraordinary naïve assumption of time as pure succession’ (S 34).
This notion of ‘pure succession’, or time as an empty form, ‘is an
abstraction from the irreversible relationship of settled past to deriva­
tive present’ (S 35). In actual concrete experience, we feel time as ‘thederivation of state from state, with the later state exhibiting conform­
ity to the antecedent.… The past consists of the community of settled
acts which, through their objectifications in the present act, establish
the conditions to which that act must conform’ (S 35).
In other words, experience does not only happen in the present
moment, in the Now. It also comprehends the past, and projects

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  23

towards the future. Even the most ‘primitive living organisms … havea sense for the fate from which they have emerged, and for the fate
towards which they go’ (S 44). Time is not so much the measure ofchange as it is the force of ‘conformation’; and it is only against
the background of this force of conformation that change is evenpossible:the present fact is luminously the outcome from its predecessors, one
quarter of a second ago. Unsuspected factors may have intervened;
dynamite may have exploded. But, however that may be, the present
event issues subject to the limitations laid upon it by the actual natureof the immediate past. If dynamite explodes, then present fact is thatissue from the past which is consistent with dynamite exploding. (S 46)

In this way, perception and judgement are themselves temporal
instances. They are nested within the broad span of ‘conformation’ or
causal influence. To perceive something is to be affected or influenced
by that something. And willed action – or more generally, what White­head in Process and Reality calls decision (PR 27–8 and passim) – canitself take place only within a given framework of causal efficacy.
This is the source of Whitehead's distinction, in Symbolism, between‘pure potentiality’ and ‘natural potentiality’ (S 37–8) – which is recast
in Process and Reality as a distinction between ‘general potentiality’and ‘real potentiality’ (PR 65). Pure or general potentiality is mere
logical possibility, while natural or real potentiality takes account of‘stubborn fact’, or of the actual ‘components which are given forexperience’ (S 36, original emphasis).
From a Whiteheadian point of view, Lewis's modal realism andMeillassoux's principle of contingency both fail because they ignore
this distinction. Since they recognise only presentational immediacy,
they abstract ‘the mere lapse of time’ from ‘the more concrete related­
ness of “conformation”’ (S 36). In consequence, they regard sheer
logical possibility – what Whitehead calls pure or general potential­
ity – as if it were natural or real potentiality. ‘According to Hume’,Whitehead says, ‘there are no stubborn facts’ (S 37), and the same
must be said for Lewis and Meillassoux. The error of these great
thinkers, we might say, results precisely from their endeavour toelimin­ate error on grounds of epistemological consistency.
For the mainstream of modern Western philosophy, causality is
an example of a relation that must be put into doubt, because itis supposedly not given in perception. Whitehead counters this byshowing that causality is not just an abstract condition for perceptive

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24  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
experience (which Kant had argued already), but is also an actually
given component of experience. Causal efficacy is in fact directly
experienced, even though this direct experience is not necessarily
conscious. In Process and Reality, Whitehead gives this in the form ofan example:[When] occasions A, B, and C enter into the experience of occasion
M, [this means that] there is thus a transmission of sensation emotion
from A, B, and C to M. If M had the wit of self-analysis, M would
know that it felt its own sensa, by reason of a transfer from A, B, andC to itself. Thus the (unconscious) direct perception of A, B, and C ismerely the causal efficacy of A, B, and C as elements in the constitu­
tion of M. (PR 115–16)

Causal efficacy is itself experienced in a vague and limited way: itis thus a primordial form of perception. But beyond this, experienceof any sort materially depends upon the functioning of causal efficacy.
Therefore, causality is more than just an example of something whose
status in perception we may argue about. In fact, it is central to
the whole theory of perception. Perception is itself a sort of causal
relation – rather than causal relations being instances that we may
perceive or not.
In this way, Whitehead's account of causal efficacy provides abridge from epistemology to ontology, or to what Whitehead calls
cosmology. For Hume, Kant and their modern successors, we cannot
talk about causality without first accounting for how we know thatcausal relations between ostensibly independent entities can exist. But
Whitehead argues that even to raise the question of how we know
is already to have accepted the operation of causal efficacy, in theform of the ‘conformation of present fact to immediate past’ (S 41).
Whitehead thus cuts the Gordian knot of Kantian critique; he frees
speculation from the grim Kantian alternative of either
1. being subjected to critique, which is to say to prior epistemologicallegitimation, or
2. being rejected as simply ‘dogmatic’.
It should be noted that Quentin Meillassoux also seeks to escape thisinfernal alternative. He claims to establish the possibility of ‘nondogmatic speculation’23 as a way of stepping outside the Kantian‘correlationist circle’24 without thereby performing a ‘pre-critical …
regression to the “naïve” stance of dogmatic metaphysics’.25 White­head describes his own speculative philosophy as ‘a recurrence to thatsymbolism ch-1.indd 24

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  25phase of philosophic thought which began with Descartes and ended
with Hume’ (PR xi). Nonetheless, I do not think that Whitehead's
constructivist proposal for solving the riddles of perception and caus­
ality can be categorised as ‘dogmatic’ in the pejorative Kantian sense.
Rather, Whitehead's speculative ‘flight in the thin air of imaginative
generalization’, together with his subsequent return to the ground‘for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation’(PR 5), allows him to perform what he describes, in another act ofsetting Kant on his feet, as ‘the self-correction by consciousness of its
own initial excess of subjectivity’ (PR 15). This is why I have sought toestablish a dialogue between Whitehead, on the one hand, and recent
speculative realist thinkers like Meillassoux and Harman, on theother. It seems to me that Whitehead anticipates many of the goalsof the speculative realists. At the same time, Whitehead offers an al­
ternative both to Meillassoux's excessive rationalism and to Harman's
grounding in phenomenology.
I will conclude by mentioning some further consequences of this
discussion, even though I cannot fully explore them here. White­head argues both that causal efficacy is directly perceived and thatthe causal conformation of the present to the immediate past is a
general process, of which direct perception in either mode is just an
example. There is therefore a curious chiasmus between perception
and causality, which intersect in something like a feedback loop.
This also implies, among other things, that there is no clear dividing
line between perception proper and causal influence more generally.
I ‘perceive’ something whenever I am affected by that something –even in cases where this does not happen consciously. For instance,
Whitehead notes that ‘the human body is causally affected by theultra-violet rays of the solar spectrum in ways which do not issue inany sensation of colour. Nevertheless such rays produce a decided
emotional effect’ (S 85).
This ‘emotional effect’ may well be a modulation of my mood: I
always feel better when I am outdoors on a sunny day. But it may also
consist in my getting sun tanned, or sunburnt, or even developing
skin cancer. Any physical response of this sort is in some sense an‘emotional’ response as well. Even below the threshold of conscious­
ness, a physical change is also a change of some sort in affective tone.
This is not only the case for human experience, but also for organismsthat Whitehead calls ‘low grade’, as when ‘a flower turns to the light’,or even when ‘a stone conforms to the conditions set by its external
environment’ (S 42).

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26  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
A lot of this has been covered in recent writings on Whitehead under
the rubric of what he calls, in Adventures of Ideas, ‘non-­sensuous
perception’ (AI 180ff.). ‘In human experience’, Whitehead writes, ‘themost compelling example of non-sensuous perception is our knowl­edge of our own immediate past’ (AI 181). All this is consistent withwhat Whitehead says in Symbolism about perception in the mode ofcausal efficacy. But Mark B. N. Hansen, in his book Feed-Forward,
argues that such an understanding of Whitehead's expanded field ofperception sells him short. Hansen urges us to consider the causal
efficacy of ‘nonperceptual sensibility’ beyond the confines of personal
memory, referring to the ways in which causal efficacy extends ‘beyond
perception’ to a domain that ‘does not and cannot appear through(human perception)’, but that human beings are now for the first timeable to access ‘indirectly … through the technical supplement affordedby biometric and environmental computational sensing’.26 White­head's expanded theory of perception is thus crucial, Hansen says,for grasping our emerging twenty-first-century media environment.
I have serious disagreements with Hansen's particular interpretationof Whitehead, but I think his overall point is enormously important,and it can be grasped in the terms that I am working through here: thechiasmic relation between perception and physical causality.
On my reading of Whitehead, perception is a subset of causal
processes more generally, while at the same time causal processes arethemselves ‘felt’, even unconsciously, as they are fed back into directperceptual experience. This is the basis for what David Ray Griffin
calls Whitehead's panexperientialism – though I prefer to use themore provocative word panpsychism. This means that differences inmentality, or in levels of what Whitehead calls ‘feeling’ (using thisword as ‘a mere technical term’) (PR 164), are always differences indegree, rather than in kind. There is no clear boundary line between
the different modes of feeling or sentience, just as ‘there is no absolute
gap between “living” and “non-living” societies’ (PR 102).
But I think that we can go further than this. Whitehead says that‘life lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices ofthe brain’ (PR 105–6). But feeling – or perception as conformation –does not need to lurk in the interstices; it happens everywhere. This
is why I do not think that Whitehead is really a vitalist. Whitehead's
conflation of perception with causal efficacy also implies the priority
of sentience over vitality. In other words, perception and feeling areamong the necessary conditions of possibility for life, rather than life
being a necessary condition of possibility for sentience.

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Whitehead on Causality and Perception  27

Why is this important? As Eugene Thacker has demonstrated
at length, in his great book After Life, all our attempts to reinvent
vitalism, to explore the possibilities of what Deleuze and Guattari
call ‘inorganic life’, and to theorise ‘Life’ in general, come up against
a series of crippling antinomies. In the actual practices of contem­
porary biotechnology, as well as in philosophical argumentation,
Thacker says, ‘thought and life approach a horizon of absoluteincommensurability; the thought of life becomes increasingly disjunc­
tive with the vague set of phenomena we call “life itself”’.27 There arecontradictions both between particular instances of life and ‘life’ as
an essence or overall concept, and between all these iterations of life
and the thought, itself alive, which tries to grasp and conceptualise it.
I suspect – though it is only a hunch at this point – that approaching
life from the point of view of sentience or feeling, rather than taking
sentience as an attribute of life, might help to offer us a way out fromthese confusions.

Notes
1 Descartes, Meditations, 13.
2 Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 6.
3 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 148–51.
4 Hume, An Enquiry, 68.
5 Hume, An Enquiry, 69.
6 Lewis, Philosophical Papers, Volume II, ix.
7 Putnam, ‘Meaning and reference’.
8 Chalmers, The Conscious Mind, 93–122.
9 Bell, ‘Between realism and anti-realism’.
10 Meillassouox, After Finitude, 82–111.
11 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 87.
12 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 65.
13 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 11.
14 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 24–5.
15 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 25.
16 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 73.
17 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 128.
18 Harman, Bells and Whistles, 34.
19 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 44.
20 Harman, The Quadruple Object, 47.
21 Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead, 33.
22 Garcia, Form and Object, 11, original emphasis.
23 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 79.
24 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 5.

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28  Rethinking Whitehead’s Symbolism
25 Meillassoux, After Finitude, 3, original emphasis.
26 Hansen, Feed-Forward, 24, original emphasis.
27 Thacker, After Life, ix–x.

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