REDISCOVERING

SYMBOLISM: ITS MEANING AND EFFECT

BY ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD

Colin Wilson

An old friend of mine, the headmaster of a major public school in England, became irritated by the friendliness of the people who traveled on his local railway line. He liked to use train journeys to read and think; his fellow travelers usually wanted to talk. One day he had immersed himself in Whitehead’s Adventures of Ideas when the other occupant of the carriage tried to inaugurate a conversation by asking him what he was reading. Hugh handed him the book, and for the next minute or so, his fellow passenger scanned the pages with an expression of increasing bafflement. Finally, he handed it back with a bewildered shake of his head and made no further attempts to interrupt. From that time on, Hugh told me, he never traveled without his Penguin paperback of Adventures of Ideas in his pocket.

I suppose that, with the exception of Heidegger, Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) is probably the most obscure of twentieth-century philosophers. When he settled at Harvard at the age of sixty-three, his fame as a “great philosopher” guaranteed that most of his later books would achieve paperback editions, and even when I first came to America in 1961, you could usually find at least a half dozen in every campus bookstore. Yet it is doubtful whether many people outside college campuses actually read works like Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought. They probably picked at them, and then gave up. (If you see copies of Whitehead in secondhand bookstores, note how often the pencil marks occur in the early pages, then fade out.)

I had bought a paperback of Science and the Modern World when I was sixteen, and I made it my business to acquire a copy of the immense Whitehead Anthology of Northrop and Gross soon after it came out in 1953. Influenced by the vitalism of Shaw and the antihumanism of T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot, I had recognized immediately that Whitehead’s concept of the “bifurcation of nature” was a powerful philosophical tool in the battle against positivism and reductionism. Whitehead had objected to the way that post-Galilean science had staked out its own field of the “scientifically knowable,” and thereby consigned art, poetry, and religion to the realm of the unmentionable. In a magnificent passage in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead listed his own notion of the kind of experience that should concern the philosopher:

Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience sceptical, experience anxious and experience carefree,…experience normal and experience abnormal.

In due course, Whitehead played a prominent part in the early pages of my first book The Outsider (1956), and was central to the concluding chapter of its sequel Religion and the Rebel. Yet I have to confess that I had never made the slightest attempt to dip into the little book with the off-putting title Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect. It sounded a bore. And it was not until I came upon an intriguing reference to it in a pamphlet on Whitehead’s philosophy of physics that I finally read the two chapters (two-thirds of the book) reprinted in the Whitehead Anthology.

I would like to say that my first reading was a revelatory experience, but that would not be true; Whitehead has no gift for immediately seizing the attention. There was certainly no instant recognition that I was reading not only one of Whitehead’s most important books but one of the most important books of the century. “The slightest survey of different epochs of civilisation discloses great differences in their attitude towards symbolism. For example, during the mediaeval period….” And he goes on to discuss language, writing, and algebraic symbolism, then points out that our perceptions are also basically symbolic: I see a colored patch and say: “That is a chair”; but it isn’t; it’s a colored patch.

We then have sections on the definition of symbolism, experience as activity, and the nature of language. Only in the eighth section, “Presentational Immediacy,” does he finally get down to business: “Our perception of the world is divided into two types of content. The first type is our immediate sensations of the present moment.” Having said which, he forgets to explain the second type, and talks about walls for another page or so. It is the tenth section before he finally recalls the second type: “Of the two distinct perceptive modes, one mode ‘objectifies’ actual things under the guise of presentational immediacy, and the other mode, which I have not yet discussed, ‘objectifies’ them under the guise of causal efficacy.” Typically, he then forgets to explain what means by “causal efficacy,” and rambles on for the rest of the first chapter about presentational immediacy.

It is not until the second chapter that Whitehead discusses “causal efficacy,” and even then he feels no urgent need to explain what he means by it. He says that the difference between “immediacy” and “causal efficacy” is that “where one is vague, the other is precise; where one is important, the other is trivial.” And he then goes on to announce, with all the gravity of a dotty professor, that “It will be evident to you that I am here controverting the most cherished tradition of modern philosophy, shared alike by the school of empiricists which derives from Hume, and the school of transcendental idealists, which derives from Kant.”

But patience – he is slowly getting there. He cites the passage in Hume, in which it becomes clear that Hume sees the mind as a passive, receptive substance – Locke’s tabula rasa – which learns from experience. But, of course, there is no “real you” behind the mind. When Hume looks inside himself, he never comes upon a person called David Hume, but merely upon a lot of ideas and impressions, swirling around like autumn leaves in the wind. Thought is mere “association” of these swirling fragments by a passive process. So when you have a sense of meaning – perhaps tasting a good wine or listening to a Beethoven symphony – this is not a “real you” perceiving real meaning; it is an imaginary “you,” who is not really there, responding with the mechanicalness of a Pavlovian reflex to something that makes you salivate. If we follow Hume, we accept that life is a totally meaningless process, and man a kind of illusion. Or, as Sartre put it, a “useless passion.”

So what is Whitehead’s alternative? If “meaning” is not an “association of ideas,” then what is it? (We have realized by now that by “causal efficacy,” Whitehead means simply “meaning perception.”) According to Whitehead, meaning is a direct perception, like sitting on a pin. When you hear the words United States, you might as well have heard America. You do not say: “United – that means all together; States – ah yes, of course, they are not talking of any united states, but of America.” There is no “association” of ideas, no matter how swift. You hear Unitedstates as one word, and it means America.

And is that a really important issue? Well, yes, it is. He is talking about a problem that can drive men mad, that can result in nervous breakdowns. When we are tired, our meaning perception tends to evaporate, and we are aware only of “immediacy.” In A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway talks about the moment when you wake up drunk in bed and the wall is going round, and you know “that is all there is.” In such states, immediacy is sitting on you so hard that you cannot even move. “That is all there is.” Whitehead cites the British prime minister Mr. Pitt, who on his death bed was heard to murmur: “What shades we are, what shadows we pursue.” (Burke actually said: “What shadows we are, what shadows we pursue,” but Pitt’s version scans better.) Whitehead comments: “His mind had suddenly lost the sense of causal efficacy, and was illuminated by the remembrance of the intensity of emotion, which had enveloped his life, in its comparison with the barren emptiness of the world passing in sense-presentation.” In other words, Pitt was simply tired, and was mistaking his tiredness for an ultimate perception of the futility of life.

This excited me so much because I had begun The Outsider with a chapter about the feeling that “that’s all there is,” the futility of human life and the vanity of human wishes. I had cited that gloomy final work by H. G. Wells called Mind at the End of Its Tether, in which he declared his belief that all life is coming to an end as its capacity for self-delusion vanishes, and we see the “cinema screen” behind the shadows. And I had gone on to discuss Sartre’s novel Nausea, in which nausea is that sudden feeling that nothing is real except matter, and that all our sense of meaning is an illusion we impose on brute, meaningless fact.

According to Sartre, “nausea” is the fundamental reality of human existence, the basic truth. That is why “it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die” and why “man is a useless passion.” But according to Whitehead, this is in itself a delusion, due to a kind of tiredness, a collapse of perception – rather like a child feeling so tired after a Christmas party that he feels all parties are totally futile.

This, for me, was the fundamental “Outsider problem,” the problem of so many of those oversensitive romantics who committed suicide or died of tuberculosis in the nineteenth century, the problem of “negation” as expressed by Dostoevski in The Possessed or by Eliot in The Waste Land and The Hollow Men. And here, incredibly, was a respectable philosopher in the British empirical tradition going right to the heart of the matter and declaring that the “meaninglessness” is a delusion, like our conviction that the sun goes round the earth. This, I think, is ultimately what I find so amazing about Whitehead. The style and the manner convince you that here is a more-or-less academic philosopher, building his incredibly abstract system in a kind of vacuum, when in fact he is a creative genius of the same order as Plato or Beethoven.

This problem of “meaning perception” is fundamental. When van Gogh painted The Starry Night, he was overwhelmed with a total conviction of meaning. When he shot himself in the stomach, he was overwhelmed with a total conviction of tragedy and meaninglessness – not just personal, but universal. “Misery will never end.” Dostoevski had raised the same question in the most powerful chapter in all his work, the “Pro and Contra” chapter of The Brothers Karamazov. And here was a British philosopher answering it quite coolly with the comment: “No, the meaningless is a simple delusion” – and then explaining it all in words of one syllable.

I had asserted in The Outsider that this is the most basic problem of human existence – all others are trivial in comparison. Reason tells us that “immediacy” is a liar, but we find it very hard to trust reason on such a momentous issue. Yet we are all familiar with the two opposed modes of perception. There are days when I feel totally trapped in the present moment, and days when I have a curious feeling of strength and optimism, a certainty that “You can win.” The problem is that the two feelings tend to be mutually contradictory, like two extremely honest people each assuring me that the other is a liar. A drunken man feels that the world is self-evidently wonderful. A man suffering from a hangover feels that it is self-evidently grim and dull. We might be inclined to believe the drunken man on the grounds that his vision is wider, a “bird’s eye view” as opposed to the “worm’s eye view” of the man suffering from headache. But, as Whitehead says, the bird’s eye view is also vaguer; the drunk may not even be able to get his key in the keyhole.

What I found so fascinating is that there are moments when the two visions seem to combine. Even Sartre’s “nauseated” hero Roquentin experiences such moments – for example, when listening to a record of a Negro woman singing “One of these days.” “My body feels at rest, like a precision machine.” Yes, in such moments we experience a curious sense of precision, of control. It is as if the two beams of perception – meaning and immediacy – combine and operate simultaneously. I compared the effect to what happens in the film The Dam Busters. The problem for the Royal Air Force was how to destroy the Moener Dam with bombs that bounced along the lake like golf balls; the bombs had to be dropped from precisely the correct height – too high and they broke up, too low and they sank. But how to judge the exact height of an aeroplane above the lake? The solution was simple: to place two spotlights on the plane, one in the nose and one in the tail, whose two beams would converge only when the plane was at exactly the correct height. When the pilot saw the two circles blend together into one on the surface of the lake, he knew he was at the right height and could release the bombs.

We all know of moods in which two beams converge, and we experience an overwhelming certainty of meaning and of objective reality. Hume says such moments are a delusion – there is only one beam. Whitehead disagrees; he says that such moments are realler than our normally limited “immediacy perception.” And this is of tremendous significance for the philosophy that has followed Sartre’s existentialism. (Here I wish that I had twice as much space to explain what I mean, but I will try to compress it.)

Existentialism was a kind of tar trap of La Brea. Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Jaspers – all declared that “reality is here and now,” and we should distrust all abstractions. But philosophy is impossible without abstractions: to reason is to “abstract” from the present reality. Caught in this paradox, the existentialists sank deeper and deeper into the tar trap until it closed over their heads.

In England, the positivists said “Good riddance.” They believed, like Wittgenstein, that “the riddle does not exist,” that things are what they are, and that’s that. But, as Whitehead pointed out (in Modes of Thought), if our ancestors of a few thousand years ago had been positivists, civilization would not exist, for it has developed through asking questions and trying to solve riddles.

The French tried to extract themselves from the mess with a philosophy called Structuralism, based on Lévi-Strauss’s recognition that primitive societies have hidden “underlying structures.” If something as “existential” as a primitive society can have hidden structures (another word for “meanings”), then there is hope yet. Michel Foucault proceeded to look for underlying structures in history (in periods he called “epistemes”) and Roland Barthes in language and literature. It was an exciting epoch. Yet the basic philosophy of Foucault and Barthes seemed to be a kind of old-fashioned materialism derived from Marx rather than Hume.

Then Jacques Derrida took England and America by storm. He began his career with a careful analysis of Husserl, who had much in common with Whitehead in his objection to the scientist’s “bifurcation of nature.” But Husserl’s central point was that there is a “controlling Me” behind perception. Perception is intentional; it flies like an arrow to its target, and the “archer” is a “hidden Me” behind perception. Sartre had already contradicted that view in an early essay (The Transcendence of the Ego), and now Derrida went further. He agreed with Hume that there is no “hidden Me” hiding inside my head. What is more, there is no genuine meaning out there either. He called meaning “presence,” and explained that “presence” is an illusion caused by time.

If this sounds too abstract for those who have never read Derrida, let me try to put it more simply. Rupert Brooke has a sonnet called “Love” in which he explains that love is an illusion. Two lovers may feel that they have established real “contact”; in fact, they are really lying “each in his own cold night, each with a ghost.” Love is a “constituted effort,” a form of what Derrida calls Presence or what Schopenhauer called illusion. If we accept this, then we are back to Sartre and Hume. We “impose” meaning on the cinema screen, but it is only shadow deep.

Derrida’s main argument against Husserl occurs in Speech and Phenomena, where he discusses Husserl’s theory of time consciousness. Husserl says that time consciousness assumes two forms: retention and reproduction. If I am trying to recall what somebody said yesterday, I have to “reconstruct” it from memory; this is reproduction. But if I am listening to someone speaking now, I do not have to “reconstruct” the first half of his sentence in order to understand the second; I grasp it as a whole. This is retention. Derrida argues that Husserl is cheating when he makes this distinction. What is the difference in principle between time that passed yesterday and time that passed a few seconds ago? Surely there is no “retention,” only reproduction?

It is easy enough to see that Husserl’s retention is Whitehead’s causal efficacy or meaning-perception. It is perhaps a little more difficult to see that Husserl’s reproduction is Whitehead’s presentational immediacy. But if we grasp the essence of the distinction between meaning and immediacy, we see that one is “whole” while the other is “piecemeal.” This is easier to grasp if we think in musical terms. If I try to recall a familiar theme – say the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony – I do so immediately; this is obviously retention, since it is the shape or “meaning” of the phrase that comes into my head. If I have to look up a theme in a score, or reconstruct it from my memory of its resemblance to some popular tune, this is reproduction; I start from “immediacy” and move to “meaning.” So although at first they look quite different, retention and reproduction are the same as meaning-perception and immediacy-perception. In which case, Whitehead’s argument against Hume can also be used against Derrida.

Derrida’s argument is that there is no instantaneous “meaning,” no “presence.” Whitehead would reply that when a baby recognizes its mother’s face, that is instantaneous meaning. The face is grasped as a gestalt, a whole. In Of Grammatology, Derrida uses Rousseau to illustrate his argument about the nonexistence of “presence.” Rousseau asked why his own life is more real to him when he writes about it than when he was living it. He thinks this is due to the weakening of his “reality function” (to borrow Pierre Janet’s term) by his habit of imagination and autoeroticism, which also explains why he finds masturbation more satisfying than “normal sex.” Derrida will not accept this explanation; he thinks that Rousseau’s assumptions reveal the “fallacy of presence,” the notion that “real life” and “normal sex” ought to be realler than writing and masturbation because they involve retention, an “immediate” grasp of meaning.

Whitehead would reply that Rousseau was right and Derrida wrong. His problems are due to a weakening of his “reality function.” If Whitehead is correct and meaning-perception is another mode of perception, then Rousseau’s problem is the same as William Pitt’s when he murmured “What shades we are, what shadows we pursue.” “Nausea” (which is what Rousseau is talking about) is due to low-energy perception. In fact, most of our human perceptions fit this description because modern man has got bogged down in symbols, in language, in “complications.” But there remain the flashes of true perception – Roquentin listening to “One of these days,” the baby recognizing its mother’s face. To deny their reality and primacy is not only to miss the point of philosophy but of life itself.

Derrida’s attack on metaphysics – the notion that life has an underlying “meaning” – was so successful that it has led to the movement known as Postmodernism (exemplified in the work of Lyotard and Baudrillard) in which the “disintegration of meaning” is taken for granted. Like Deconstruction, Postmodernism is based upon the same simple assertion: that “meaning” is an illusion that can be analyzed into its constituent parts. Look at a newspaper photograph of a smiling girl through a magnifying glass; it dissolves into dots. This, say, the neo-Humeans, proves that the smile is not a gestalt; it is “constituted” by the dots. According to Whitehead, the dots are irrelevant. “United States” is made up of two words, but we grasp it as a unity: America. Look at the photograph from a distance and you see that the smile is genuine, and that the photograph captures an “essence.” Try to break down that essence into the property of the dots, and you fail utterly. It was there, in the smiling girl.

It can be seen that this is not only an important issue; it is the important issue. The Humean position was first expressed by Ecclesiastes, when he stated that all life is vanity (i.e., that “presence” is an illusion). Clearly, Whitehead disagrees. Those who want to know exactly why he disagrees should take a deep breath and try Process and Reality (in which the two modes of perception occupy a central position). Those who prefer their metaphysics in a more digestible form may find Religion in the Making more to their taste.

I am aware that my earlier comments on Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect had a critical ring. The truth is that Whitehead is a bad organizer; he would have written atrocious symphonies. His merit lies in brilliant perceptions and in images that stick in the mind (e.g., likening philosophical arguments to cavalry charges in a battle, or comparing Latin to a tightly packed suitcase, and English to a suitcase that lies open with all its contents displayed). Those who come to love Whitehead for his dazzling perceptions and memorable images can easily forgive him the lack of organization. Whitehead once called William James “that adorable genius,” and anyone who admires both philosophers can recognize that the description applies equally to Whitehead himself. It hardly matters that Symbolism is a muddle; it is also one of the most important books ever written.