THE TRANSCENDENCE OF ACTUAL ENTITIES

Whitehead tells us that there is no piece of data that is totally private. This is because we construct meaning in concrescences that are derived from public entities not present in the data of the perceived event.

There is no element in the universe capable of pure privacy. If we could obtain a complete analysis of meaning, the notion of pure privacy would be seen to be self-contradictory…To be “something” is “to have the potentiality for acquiring real unity with other entities.” Hence, “to be a real component of an actual entity” is in some way “to realize this potentiality.”

Whitehead’s “potentiality for acquiring real unity” is effected by the interventions of actual entities such as “straightness” in other concrescent processes. If the entity “straightness” intervenes in a concrescent process transcending itself, it functions as an “object” (as sign that been derived from the world and that can instigate further cognitive action.) For example, I look at the edge of a picture frame and see that it is straight. I screen out potential objects that could be elicited by the color, material and ornamental details of the picture frame to fasten on straightness as “object.” By appropriating the eternal object “straightness” from the public world of straightness beyond my present perception, my notion of the picture frame has included my private conceptual feeling of public straightness as a transcending element.

Seeing and feeling one thing in another is the means by which we abstract the notion of straightness. It is also the means by which we create the metaphors that link all the various domains of experience. Language and all other classes of symbolic form depend on the process of transcendence to form actual entities. However, according to Whitehead, most scientists and logicians, up to and during the present century, have assumed that a simple, unambiguous subject followed by a simple unambiguous predicate represents the actual ordering of our observations and of understanding, in spite of every evidence to the contrary. Remember Whitehead’s caution that Humpty-Dumpty does not precede the wall on which he sits.

For example, when Huck Finn asks, “Why cant Miss Watson fat up?” there is no way for the conventional subject predicate structure to account for the links among the domains of feeling and thought that arise from cross-classifying the words “fat” and “up.” The collage-like compression ”fat up” combines the action and implications of verb, adjective and adverb, and becomes and an experiential gestalt acting as a noun for an all directional state mapped onto embodied experience about the shape and scale of our bodies, not merely the notion of a vertical “up.” Gertrude Stein might have said that the compression “fat up” engages flexible American mind that is prepared for the movement of content among the entities Huck, Miss Watson, fat and up. Stein created many multilayered examples of verbal collage in American literature, such as “Tender Buttons” and “Pigeons on the Grass, Alas.” According to Stein, in a lecture contrasting American literature with English literature, the boundaries of American states are often straight lines across which Americans freely wander. That wandering, compared to the more insular English life, contributed to a mental flexibility to create new meanings out of inherited English words. Whether Mark Twain invented the phrase “fat up” or overheard it, the expression demonstrates how a phrase born in the privacy of an individual required an English-speaking public and, most probably, an American temperament, for recognition and appreciation.

To most Americans in 1950, usage of the word “hair” was probably confined to those meanings sanctioned by the dictionary.  By the late ‘sixties, the word “hair” could be used as the title of a Broadway musical, and refer to a clutch of cross-classification of counterculture dress, images and attitudes. About 1950 several college classmates and I used the word “hairy” (a thicket- like mass of hair from which unseen, dangerous, wild and subversive potentialities might emerge) to describe some of the “far out” student designs in the architectural school at the University of Oklahoma. I thought this use of the word came from the student culture at culture at Oklahoma, and that I, looking for public success as most of us are, had originated it. I read later, in a dictionary of American slang, that similar meanings of “hair” and “hairy” began in the teen culture of 1950 California. The slang meanings quickly swept the country, demonstrating a public readiness to utilize some of “hairy’s” associations (transcendent entities). Slang terms dramatize, and then often devalue by unfeeling repetition and inaccurate usage, the process of transcendence and metaphor that form the generative base of thought.



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