Whitehead as Correlationist?

“The mind in apprehending also experience sensations which, properly speaking, are qualities of the mind alone. These sensations are projected by the mind so as to clothe appropriate bodies in external nature. Thus the bodies are perceived as which qualities which in reality do not belong to them, qualities which in fact are purely the offspring of the mind. Thus nature gets credit which should in truth be reserved for ourselves: the rose for its scent: the nightingale for his song: and the sun for his radiance. The poets are entirely mistaken. They should address their lyrics to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation on the excellence of the human mind. Nature is a dully affair, soundless, scentless, colourless: merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly.”

-- Alfred North Whitehead, from Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), pg 54.

[ h/t Anarchy Without Content ]

Qualities of the mind alone? I think not. Honestly, I don’t know Whitehead well enough to comment on the merits of his 'theory of mind', but in reading this passage I feel compelled to argue and suggest that ‘mind’ is not a thing at all, and therefore incapable of creating some conjured plasma of “sensation” which it then thrusts upon a formless world. 'Sensation' is a precondition for mind. 'Mind' is that captured illusion excreted by memory which takes itself for some-thing, while always actually being the flux and the temporary conjuction of body and context and the resulting flows. Consciousness, from this view, is a mind-ing of particular kinds of sensual beings; it is simply one property and co-local event within an ecology of flesh, sensuality, networks, flows and objects.

Yet objects, entities and assemblages have their own vibrancy, force or efficacy that is not entirely given to them by hominid appending faculties. Of course we humans form and project interpretations and filter experience (translate) in our encounters with the world of things via our nervous systems, but in the confrontation between nervous systems and entities each assemblage brings with them a certain potency or capacity which is inherent to each. This embodied, contextual, constituent capacity is an entity’s substantiality.

And indeed such ‘substances’ are never outside of their relations and the flows and forces of their maintenance - as each temporal substantiality is implicated, involved and generated in process – but, as the object-oriented remind us, there is an excess, or irreducible efficacy to individualized things which bursts forth in affective flurries of limited (partial) interaction.

“Nature”, then, is not devoid of qualities, it overflows with them. Every-thing and process that makes up a world has contributing properties. Thus we live in an entirely sensual world - a raging symphony of dynamic properties and novel assemblies, of saturated beings generated out of difference and collaboration, mixing and mingling at their edges, but ever participating from the rich depths of their constitution. 

Therefore when we assume too much about the hominid capacity for importing meaning and character we narcissistically turn inward, forming an imaginal hall of mirrors blocking any possibility for a deeper appreciation for the things themselves, while also stunting the development of more potent modes of self-understanding that such an appreciation might engender. The cosmos persists within and beyond us, and always in addition to our speculations.

UPDATE:

With a little help from my friends (in the comments below), I just found out that this quote is taken out of context. I’m told that Whitehead is actually being sarcastic here in depicting John Locke's theory of primary and secondary qualities. In other words, this is not Whitehead's position but rather the one he is arguing against.

To put the quote in its immediate context, the very next lines read as follows:

"However you disguise it, this is the practical outcome of the characteristic scientific philosophy which closed the seventeenth century. In the first place, we must note its astounding efficiency as a system of concepts for the organisation of scientific research. In this respect, it is fully worthy of the genius of the century which produced it. It has held its own as the guiding principle of scientific studies ever since. It is still reigning. Every university in the world organises itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organising the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. It is not only reigning, but it is without a rival. And yet it is quite unbelievable."

And a little later in the book:

"Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined. It has oscillated in a complex manner between three extremes. There are the dualists, who accept matter and mind as on equal basis, and the two varieties of monists, those who put mind inside matter, and those who put matter inside mind. But this juggling with abstractions can never overcome the inherent confusion introduced by the ascription of misplaced concreteness to the scientific scheme of the seventeenth century."

When I first encountered this quote I immediately thought something was askew. I’ve never read anything like that from Whitehead before, and was taken aback by what I perceive as a very ill-informed understanding of how (I believe) perception and consciousness actually works. I obviously need to read more Whitehead.

And, for the record, I also take issue with Locke’s model. I think the primary/secondary divide is artificial and based on a very incomplete (non-empirical) position in comparison with what we now know about embodied cognitive faculties. Perception is far more sensuous and intrinsic to the nature of embodied entities.

“…we have mistaken our abstractions for concrete realities." Indeed we have.