An extract from an incisive paper by Shaviro posted at his blogsite (fourth item down) at:
The Pinocchio Theory
Whitehead on Causality and Perception
December 6th, 2014
". . .
Without this conformation of the present to the past, this physical experience of causal efficacy, the clarities and intensities of presentational immediacy could not even arise for us in the first place. Even our most clear and distinct perceptions are grounded in a deeper sense that is "vague, haunting, unmanagable" (S 43). Our very awareness of sharp and delicious sensations, and our ability to make subtle discriminations among them – what Whitehead describes as our "self-enjoyment derived from the immediacy of the show of things" – is underwritten 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 than just bundles of qualities:
These primitive emotions are accompanied by the clearest recognition of other actual things reacting upon ourselves. The vulgar obviousness of such recognition is equal to the vulgar obviousness produced by the functioning of any one of our five senses. When we hate, it is a man that we hate and not a collection of sense-data – a causal, efficacious man. (S 45)
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, "we encounter the… object directly in experience from the start," as Harman insists, rather than building up a representation of the object from a bundle of separate sense impressions. My direct experience of the object in the mode of causal efficacy subtends my identification of it in the mode of presentational immediacy. And it is only by abstracting away from causal efficacy, with its "overwhelming conformation of fact, in present action, to antecedent settled fact" (S 41) that we can enjoy 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" (
The Quadruple Object 73), and that causation can only be "vicarious" (128). For this is only the case from the viewpoint of presentational immediacy. In causal efficacy, objects
do literally touch one another. This immediacy of touch follows directly from "the principle of conformation, whereby what is already made becomes a determinant of what is in the making… The present fact is luminously the outcome from its predecessors, one quarter of a second ago" (S 46). The principle of conformation applies equally to my own continuity with who I was a quarter of a second ago, and to my contact with things 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" (
Bells and Whistles 34). Harman’s problem is to maintain separation at the same time that he accounts for causal influence. As Harman puts it, even when fire burns cotton, there is no direct contact between these two entities. The fire may well obliterate the cotton with no remainder. But even then, Harman says, "fire does not interact at all" with such qualities as "the cotton’s odor or color" (
The Quadruple Object 44). Therefore fire and cotton remain ontologically separate, in accordance with Harman’s dictum that "the object is a dark crystal veiled in a private vacuum" (47).
Now, Isabelle Stengers insists that Whitehead always works as a mathematician, even when he is engaged in philosophical speculation. Whitehead does not posit absolute principles; rather, he always confronts specific problems, by producing a construction that observes all "the constraints that the solution will have to satisfy" (
Thinking With Whitehead 33). In this sense, Whitehead’s distinction between presentational immediacy and causal efficacy is itself constructed as a way to resolve the problem of error, and scepticism about causality, that are found in the Humean and Kantian 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 25-26). This allows him to assert both:
- that things actually do enter into direct contact with other things, as they partially determine the composition of those other things; and
- that no particular thing is entirely subsumed, either by the other things that entered into it and helped to determine its own composition, 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 that Whitehead’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 is defined as the difference between "
that which is in a thing and
that in which a thing is, or that which it comprehends and that which comprehends it" (
Form and Object 11). Garcia, like Whitehead, refuses to explain away causal efficacy, while at the same time recognizing what Whitehead calls "the vast causal independence of contemporary occasions" which "is the preservative of elbow-room within the Universe. It provides each actuality with a welcome environment for irresponsibility" (AI 195).
The larger point here is that causal efficacy is at one and the same time a mode of perception and an actual physical process. It encompasses both "the perceived redness and warmth of the fire" and "the agitated molecules of carbon and oxygen… the radiant energy from them, and… the various functionings of the material body" (CN 32). In this double functioning, causal efficacy is irreducible to rigid determinism, but also impregnable to philosophical scepticism. . . ."
