Humean models of empiricism, I find them too austere. I prefer the lineage of
inter-relation that runs from James through Whitehead which is not willing to
completely jettison the phenomenological (the lived immediacy of actual
experience, before any reflection on it)^17 and the consequent neglect of the
transitive. At the same time, I want to temper what seem to me to be the more
extreme manifestations of this lineage, which can end up by positing a continuity
of and to experience about which I am sceptical, by employing an ethological
notion of the pre-individual field in which the event holds sway and which leads
to ‘buds’ or ‘pulses’ of thought-formation/perception in which ‘thought is never
an object in its own hands’ (James 1960 [1890]: 522). This approach seems to
me to be very much in line with Whitehead’s monistic way of thinking about the
world. As Pred puts it:
Whitehead extends the scope of radical empiricism and, in effect, points to a
way to overcome the limitations inherent in the spatiotemporal and sensory
(visual, aural, tactile) metaphor of the stream [of consciousness]. Instead of
merely taking a ‘general view of the wonderful stream of our consciousness’,
Whitehead goes ‘into’ the moment. He refuses to abstract from the moment,
any moment, understood as an act of experience issuing from and into other
experiences, as an act occurring within the constraints of inheritance from
all that is encompassed within the experient’s past and with the onflow
of experiences. By bringing philosophical analysis into the bud, Whitehead
secures access to a post-Cartesian/Humean basis for ontology, and can charac-
terize momentary consciousness as it arises from pre-conscious moments
of synthesis within a broader stream... of activity.
Whitehead applies the notion of buds not only to human moments of
experience but also, more broadly, to actual entities or occasions – ‘the final
real things of which the world is made up’. He elaborates the notions of actual
entities and concrescence with rigor and thoroughness, ‘with the purpose of
obtaining a one-substance cosmology’.
(Pred 2005: 11)Another proposition, which follows on naturally from these thoughts, is that the
most effective approach values the pre-cognitive as something more than an
addendum to the cognitive. What is called consciousness is such a narrow window
of perception that it could be argued that it could not be otherwise. As Donald
(2001) makes clear, defined in a narrow way, consciousness seems to be a very
poor thing indeed, a window of time – fifteen seconds at most – in which just a
few things (normally no more than six or seven) can be addressed, which is opaque
to introspection and which is easily distracted. Indeed, consciousness can be
depicted as though it hardly existed, as an emergent derivative of an unconscious.
Yet it is clearly dangerous to make too little of cognition, as I perhaps did in
some of my early papers. Because it is so weak (though hardly as weak as some
commentators have depicted it), it has enrolled powerful allies which can focus
and extend conscious awareness – various configurations of bodies and things
which, knitted together as routinized environments, enable a range of different
6 Life, but not as we know it