EVENTS

An event sets a limit on perceived experience. It enables us to think about the contents of the experience as a happening selected out of the profusion of sense presentation. Events have particulars such as forms, colors, sounds and tastes that we process into objects, feelings and ideas.  While an event is a perceptual demarcation of entities, the content and meaning of these entities stems from a synthesis of feelings and ideas that we process into various scenarios of meaning. The way in which the contents and meanings of an event become representations in the mind, and how these features maintain self-continuity and pass into other states, has increasingly received scientific and philosophic study, which can inform us as we reflect on our everyday experiences.
 
For example, take a pencil held in my hand as a perceived event.  I find it situated with other events in the same visual field, such as the yellow pad on which I write and the part of the room that I see beyond my hand and pad.  Perceived details of the pencil could include its shape, the material of which it is made, its weight and its logo.  Each detail discloses its own connections of the world, connections that we use to form a particular closure of the whole, as in a chewed, #2 yellow pencil, or an expensive gift pencil that I am afraid to lose. 

Our concept of the details, which can be considered as events, such as the logo on the pencil, and the ensuing closures of meaning that we use an processing the meaning of the pencil, depend on an unseen ground of memory and a propensity for anticipation and learning that we develop over a lifetime.  A baby reaches for the moon and will only gradually bring new memories to that image to know that the moon is out of reach.  For Buddhists, the circle serves as a symbol of endlessness and hence of aimless change.  In the West it is often a symbol of an ideal limit and perfection.  The neurologist R.L.Gregory documents the case of a fifty-year-old man, blind from birth, who recovered his sight thorough a surgical procedure.  At first this man, who had successfully adapted to an unsighted world, was enthralled over the buzzing plenitude of newly-visible shapes.  As time went on, however, these visible shapes seemed empty to him.  He also had great difficulty with depth perception.  For instance, he would stumble over the chairs in a room.  His drawing of a bus was much less coherent than that of a four-year-old.  He began to feel disadvantaged competing with sighted people, even though his other perceptive senses were adequate to his needs.  What he lacked was the accumulated background or embodied experience necessary to inform visual perception.  According to Gregory, the man became overwhelmed by his deficiency, lost interest in life, and died several years later. 

The complex issues effecting perception and mind that are suggested by the examples above can be made more tractable with Whitehead’s theory.  To begin, Whitehead starts with the rough, unformulated world where the immediate actual events of life are made apparent by sight, touch, taste, smell, sound and our more inchoate feelings.  This radically untidy field of activity is the only place where our intellectual derivations can begin.  Whitehead, with his unerring instinct of the body as receptor and generator of experience, repeatedly stresses how this fact has been hidden by the “exact” language of classical science.  It is as if the “exact” abstractions can represent the immediate deliverances of sense experience, which is both incurably vague and complex.  A particular shade of color, a taste or sound is never a smooth, sharp demarcation of fact. 

It is because sense data seem so distinct and vivid to us that civilization since the Greeks has imputed a preeminent clarity to these data.  With modern studies in psychology, perception and cognition, and through the insights of philosophers including Telesio, Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty, we now understand that the clarity of sense perception arises from a background of bodily experience and a complex network of memory and association.  The discrimination of a particular shade of blue sky or the ability to perceive depth are dependent on these dimly-perceived backgrounds. 

A particular shade of blue sky in Whitehead’s system is already a complex unity based on an integration of many factors, such as a sense of light and atmosphere, the possible contexts of adjoining landscape, an awareness that the sky is this shade of blue and not some other, and the thought habits of the viewer.  The selection and synthesis of these factors represents the formation of what Whitehead calls “actual entities,” a realization of a particular atmosphere, color shade, contrasts with clouds, and other factors, so that the actual entity can be identified and thought about.  Here he is speaking about matter conceived as process, but the concept applies to perception as process as well.
           
The older point of view expressed in classical dynamics enables us to abstract from change and to conceive of the full reality of nature at an instant, in abstraction from any temporal duration and characterized…solely by the instantaneous distribution of matter in space… [F]or the modern view, process, activity and change are the matter of fact, at an instant there is nothing.  Each instant is only a way of grouping matters of fact.  Thus there are no instants, conceived as simple primary entities.  There is no nature at an instant.

C.H. Waddington, the English geneticist and Nobel laureate, has commented on Whitehead’s events as follows:

“We [scientists] start by accepting the real existence of certain scientific objects such as atoms, electrons, gravitation, light, etc…. Whitehead stated that we start somewhere else; not with objects, but with “events” which are four-dimensional happenings, i.e. processes.  All knowledge, and all talk, is derived from experiences of events.  Scientific objects – atoms, etc. – are not basic, but are derivative, intellectual constructs invented to assist us to understand events….For Whitehead real existents were events.  Each event has a definite character, but this results from the “concrescence” of an infinite number of objects, which are essentially relations with other events, through their “prehensions” into a unity…In doing science we have, on the one hand, to try to formulate simple objects which express the most important causal relations between events, but at the same time we have to ensure that these objects include (as sub-objects) as many as possible of all those involved in the event.  The thrust of Whitehead’s thought is not to simplify unduly; every time you reduce you leave something out, and scientific ideas are richer and nearer to nature the less that has had to be omitted in order to reach them…[E]very event reacts with every other, but not with all aspects of every other.” 

This concept of events as four-dimensional happenings with potential connections via their prehensions is the seminal concept behind Whitehead’s philosophy and probably all collage paintings.  Indeed, it is a concept with which we can begin to explain the coordination found among all physical and imagined events – including the coordination of collage juxtapositions – from Picasso’s toy car-baboon mother, to the ubiquitous television commercials for Energizer batteries.  In an example of the latter, the battery-driven, toy pink bunny beating a drum incongruously marches across a scene in which two well-dressed, thirty-something women, languorously seated in Ethan Allen “French provincial” furniture, are assiduously praising a brand of French roast coffee.  Among other references the collage makes a comparison between the somewhat languorous gestures and fashionable pomp of the women and the disarming herky-jerky motions of the animated toy, which express a certain energy, gaiety and determination.  If we consider the battery ad in terms of events, certain prehensions and actual entities of the toy bunny gestures and those of the stereotyped women are compared by similarities and contrasts.  We may enjoy the ad, which, among its other meanings, can be read as lightly humorous comment on social pretensions while impressing us with the name recognition and “longevity” of Energizer batteries, leaving us with feelings of good-natured humor and self-approval at recognizing the airs projected by the women. 



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