Whitehead by John B. Cobb, Jr
Chapter 2: The Human Soul
5. The Unconscious
pole of another person’s experience. Experiences have been reported in which occasions of experience in the distant past have been
"remembered" in this way. If personal identity is defined as I have defined it, then all mental experiences subject to being prehended unmediatedly must be included in the living person. We can solve the problem definitionally by appealing to the fact that the living person is serially ordered, but the deeper question remains. It can be pointed up by a wild hypothesis.
If the dominant occasion in my body began to "remember" the past dominant occasions of another body and to fail to remember its own, my definition would require that it be regarded as a continuation of the other person. This would seem proper to common sense also, if we may appeal to common sense in this realm of fantasy. But what if successor occasions continued to occur in the other body in a quite normal
fashion? Would these two strands of occasions then be the same living person?
An analogous difficulty can be posed with respect to the suggested possibility of life after death. Suppose that after my death there is a set of serially ordered occasions that enjoy unmediated memory of all the occasions of my life. Is it not possible still to wonder whether those occasions will be "me"? If so, it is clear that the definition of personal identity I have offered does not really exhaust the common intuition of self-identity. That intuition remains mysteriously unformulable.
(Whitehead also speaks of "the mystery of personal identity," and says that "in respect to such intuitions . . . our powers of analysis, and of expression, flicker with our consciousness" [AI 210]). It may be an illusion, but I suggest that it is a persistent one which remains baffling in the light of any existing philosophy.
Meanwhile, so long as the eccentric possibilities I have mentioned are never actualized, the account I have proposed is quite satisfactory for practical purposes. It is that personal identity obtains whenever there is a serially ordered society of primarily mental occasions (a soul) in which each occasion actually or potentially prehends unmediatedly the mental poles of all its predecessors.
our day for the understanding of man. When Whitehead spoke of the soul, he focused attention upon consciousness, but his philosophy also points up the very large role of unconscious experience.
"Consciousness," Whitehead tells us, "presupposes experience, and not experience consciousness." (PR 83.) Most actual occasions of
experience enjoy no consciousness at all. Where consciousness occurs, it appears as the subjective form of some part of the higher phases of experience. It presupposes a complex process of comparison of earlier and simpler phases of experience which can never enter into
consciousness. It depends specifically upon negation, upon the contrast of what is with what might be.(PR 372.)
The occurrence of consciousness is of immense importance. Apart from it, no high form of animal life would be possible. Apart from conscious enjoyment, all value would seem trivial. All our thought presupposes consciousness, as does all our effort to consider the unconscious
dimensions of experience. Nevertheless, Whitehead’s philosophy agrees with the depth psychologists in emphasizing the priority and greater massiveness of what is unconscious. Clear consciousness focuses itself upon the appearances immediately surrounding our bodies. Very dimly it suggests that there is another mode of relation to our bodies and their environment in which their reality is effective in us. But this awareness of the world in the mode of causal efficacy fades away before close attention. We can grasp the massiveness and complexity of what is present in our unconscious experience in relation to the relative
simplicity and superficiality of our consciousness by considering what we, in fact, are experiencing in each occasion in comparison with that which we can bring into focus with some conscious clarity.(Cf.
Whitehead’s discussion of consciousness, e.g., MT 166-171.)
Consider again Whitehead’s basic doctrine that each occasion prehends every occasion in its past. This has been stated again and again, but it remains an idea utterly staggering to the imagination. It means that a virtually infinite number of discrete entities are each playing some role, however trivial, in each moment of my experience. Of course, the vast majority of these influences are mediated through contiguous occasions.
But somehow, Whitehead insists, their distinctive efficacy is therein preserved.
Even if we limit our consideration to occasions immediately contiguous to the soul, the contents of our experience are quite amazing. In each occasion we are immediately prehending numerous occasions of
experience in the brain. We are totally incapable of becoming conscious of these prehensions, although it is through them that we receive the eternal objects that we project upon the environing world as sensa. All of our most immediate experience of other occasions remains
unconscious, qualifying consciousness only with a vague sense of derivation from the body.
In addition to this, consider the prehensions of past occasions of the soul’s life. Let us assume that these are, as Whitehead says, summed up with some peculiar completeness in each new occasion of the soul. Let us assume further, as I have suggested above, that they are all
immediately felt at all times as well as being mediated by proximate occasions. In this instance, we can indeed become conscious of some fragments of these feelings. Most of the time I am not conscious of my immediately precedent experiences, but by a focusing of attention I can become so with considerable vividness. Similarly, many occasions of the more distant past can be recalled with varying degrees of conscious vividness. But since consciousness presupposes experience and not experience consciousness, we must reckon with the possibility that all of them are, in fact, prehended at all times -- hence, with an immense richness of unconscious experience.
Beyond this are the prehensions of other persons. Here too there seem to be exceptional occasions in which these prehensions can be lifted into conscious awareness. But clearly, the vast majority of such prehensions remain totally unconscious. Furthermore, these prehensions need not be limited to the recent experiences of those prehended. Past experiences, even remote past experiences, are not excluded. There may be
immediate feeling of every past experience of the race insofar as mentality functioned significantly therein.
These last ideas are not necessitated by Whitehead’s doctrine, but they seem to be a reasonable interpretation. Whitehead affirms only that the present occasion prehends its entire past either mediately or
immediately. Where past occasions are objectified by their physical poles, all that are not contiguous are mediated through the contiguous occasions. Where they are objectified by their mental poles, contiguity is not necessary. Since primarily mental occasions are presumably most often objectified by their mental poles when prehended by other
primarily mental occasions, immediate prehension of all of them seems indicated.
This idea is certainly fantastic, although no more so than many that have been made commonplace by modern physics. Moreover, depth
psychology seems to provide some evidence for its truth. Mysterious concepts like that of the racial unconscious, quite inexplicable as they are usually presented, become fully intelligible in the context of Whitehead’s philosophy. Whether all past occasions of experience of human souls are directly prehended in each new occasion is indeed a factual question, but insofar as evidence of the influence of the past upon our psychic life is uncovered, it tends to confirm the natural speculations issuing from Whitehead’s philosophy.