PROCESS

Whitehead’s project in explaining process was concerned with how the energetic activity considered in physics becomes the emotional intensity of life.  To this end he utilized traditional philosophic terms with terms and explanations derived from modern physics, such as “vectors” and quanta,” from life sciences, such as “bodily feelings,” and from mathematics, such as “coordinate division” to develop his explanations.  We continually accept new terms such as “nanosecond” and megabyte” and should not be put off because some of whitehead’s terms seem unfamiliar.  At the same time Whitehead points out how an old, established metaphysical system gains a false air of adequacy and precision from the fact that its words and phrases have passed into current literature and remain widely accepted.  Lakoff and Johnson, throughout their book Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (1999), mount overpowering arguments that delineate biases and errors concerning “static” matter and “separate” mind that have been absorbed in the language of scientific materialism and classical rationalism, and that currently abuse notions of common sense.  To give just one of dozens of their examples, Kantian morality, with its tenet of an autonomous intellectual will that is free of emotion and based on pure reason, must be qualified by current neuroscience, in which Damasio has reported on patients with damage to certain cerebral connective tissues.  The patient’s ability to reason cannot function when it is cut off from emotional centers in the brain. 

    To get back to Whitehead, his description remains for me the most apt philosophic explanation of how process works in forming mental concepts.  I want to comment on his system as an influence in how I think about and make images.  Whitehead’s idea of process requires familiarity with his understanding and use of potentiality; for example, how potentially might be actualized during my realization of chopping a tomato.

    Imagine that I see in front of me a ripe tomato, knife, cutting board, chili powder and bowl.  I grip the tomato and chop off a piece.  Potentiality refers to both the physical elements and the mental activity of making linkages involved in the act right down to considering the atomic.  Considering the tomato, my hand, knife and board as Whitehead’s actual occasions, I have prehensions of them and their representations, both actual and immanent, within my conscious-unconscious gradient.  There is a certain firmness and gentleness in my fingers holding the tomato, a lack of enthusiasm in hoping fro a good tomato taste in a California tomato, a recognition of the separate piece, the hazard of the knife, the anticipation of adding spices to my proven recipe, and so on.  In this instance I have to force myself to consider the atomic, but it is within the realm of potentialities.  The actualizations become only to perish, with some of their antecedents being actualized in some new form as I proceed to think about making my renowned guacamole.  Potentialities of the tomato alone could include its edibility, nutritive value, soil enrichment, spoilage, climate for growing, a petrified, Runyonesque metaphor of a ripe tomato as a beautiful young woman, and more.  According to Damasio, consciousness only arises when the chopped tomato as object, myself as the organism, and their relationships can be re-represented. 

    This process of re-representation is enlightened by Professor Wallach’s interpretation of Whitehead’s definition of potentiality.  Potentiality is not actuality, but neither is it nothing at all.  It is the aim for achieving a new definite actuality; it is reaching for the togetherness of feelings that form a novel being.  Our own attitude shapes what we see at least as much as what we see effects us.  Perception consists of prehensions of what we see, hear, touch, taste and recall made conscious.  A large dose of chili pepper may be unbearable to some and zestful to others.  An appearing dog may hearten some and discourage others.  It is how a subject prehends or feels its antecedents that causes it to be what it is.  In humans and, to a surprising extent, in chimps and dogs, Whitehead says there are notable feelings of sympathy, that is, conforming to and with another within a range of positive and negative feelings to continue or to break off the interchange.

    During this process the enduring object of the chopped piece of tomato may also be likened to a space-time system entering into a plurality of space-time systems given by the knife-blade, chili, tomato and bowl.  Time is no more an enduring substance than is the mental or physical actualization of the chopped tomato.  The Whiteheadian unit of time within process is the “epoch”.  The epoch embraces the potentialities of the linkages in space-time among the cross section of various prehensions of bland tomato, blade, bowl and seasonings that are being actualized.

    With this foreground I take up the analysis of a collage painting.  The photograph BY Cartier-Bresson included in the Crying Frenchman collage.  It shows an interrogation at a deportation camp in Dessau, Germany in 1945.  The most arresting event is probably the angered woman striking or gesticulating toward the shamed woman, who appears to  be a camp functionary, perhaps a guard.  According to the caption accompanying the photograph, this functionary informed the Gestapo about the angry woman.  Teeth bared in a snarl, the angry woman has her large, sturdy chest thrust out and her neck stiffened so that her body=gestalt can be read as combining strong aggression and repulsion at the same time.  I also have positioned prehensions of French national character enforced by other occasions, such as the face of the angry woman, the sitting man, the standing man in prison stripes with the cap, the thin-faced man with beret directly in back of the angry woman’s gesticulating arm (could he have been a member of the resistance?), and the shamed woman, who all appear to me to be French.  I am feeling positive prehensions of “Frenchness” that I wish to continue.  I can’t verify my prehensions of “Frenchness,” but with the information at hand I am unable to suppress them. 


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