The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919Whitehead, Alfred North
Philosophy
The Concept of Nature: The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
Whitehead, Alfred North
Knowledge, Theory of; Nature; Science -- Philosophy
This is the concept of a definite factor in nature. This factor is an
event in nature which is the focus in nature for that act of awareness,
and the other events are perceived as referred to it. This event is part
of the associated duration. I call it the 'percipient event.' This event
is not the mind, that is to say, not the percipient. It is that in
nature from which the mind perceives. The complete foothold of the mind
in nature is represented by the pair of events, namely, the present
duration which marks the 'when' of awareness and the percipient event
which marks the 'where' of awareness and the 'how' of awareness. This
percipient event is roughly speaking the bodily life of the incarnate
mind. But this identification is only a rough one. For the functions of
the body shade off into those of other events in nature; so that for
some purposes the percipient event is to be reckoned as merely part of
the bodily life and for other purposes it may even be reckoned as more
than the bodily life. In many respects the demarcation is purely
arbitrary, depending upon where in a sliding scale you choose to draw
the line.
I have already in my previous lecture on Time discussed the association
of mind with nature. The difficulty of the discussion lies in the
liability of constant factors to be overlooked. We never note them by
contrast with their absences. The purpose of a discussion of such
factors may be described as being to make obvious things look odd. We
cannot envisage them unless we manage to invest them with some of the
freshness which is due to strangeness.
It is because of this habit of letting constant factors slip from
consciousness that we constantly fall into the error of thinking of the
sense-awareness of a particular factor in nature as being a two-termed
relation between the mind and the factor. For example, I perceive a
green leaf. Language in this statement suppresses all reference to any
factors other than the percipient mind and the green leaf and the
relation of sense-awareness. It discards the obvious inevitable factors
which are essential elements in the perception. I am here, the leaf is
there; and the event here and the event which is the life of the leaf
there are both embedded in a totality of nature which is now, and within
this totality there are other discriminated factors which it is
irrelevant to mention. Thus language habitually sets before the mind a
misleading abstract of the indefinite complexity of the fact of
sense-awareness.
What I now want to discuss is the special relation of the percipient
event which is 'here' to the duration which is 'now.' This relation is a
fact in nature, namely the mind is aware of nature as being with these
two factors in this relation.
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