Consciousness Flickers - Process and Reality

Process and Reality ...

"Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension."

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, page 267

Mathematician-turned-metaphysician, Alfred North Whitehead was a philosopher who walked the narrow edge between worlds. Responsible for founding the field of "process philosophy" or "process metaphysics," he paved the way for a growing interest in the ebbs and flow of conscious and unconscious experience. For Whitehead, these two aspects, conscious and unconscious, comprised an essential continuum.

Whitehead's process approach, as its name suggests, emphasized the perspective that all phenomena are processes forever in flux as opposed to concrete, solid entities fixed in time and space. In Process and Reality, he outlines this "philosophy of organism," as he calls it, reflecting that existence is a process of becoming, which in turn is a creative advance into novelty.

Here we provide a close reading and unpacking of a particularly striking quote from Whitehead on consciousness, hopefully illuminating its potential as a stepping stone into his work.

Consciousness Flickers

Consciousness flickers, reflects Whitehead.

In the above quote from his magnum opus, Process and Reality, Whitehead employs imagery relating to light and darkness to illustrate and thereby illuminate the nature of conscious experience. Consciousness flickers insofar as it makes itself known, like a candle's flame in an otherwise dark room. Yet even at its brightest, its power to illuminate reaches only so far. A single candle, even with flame at full strength, cannot illuminate an entire expansive dungeon. Much remains in a penumbral region, a shadowy darkness, which reflects another aspect of experience that often goes unnoticed. Even in this darkness, in this unconsciousness where apprehension is at best dim, can exist intense experience.

Manifest consciousness, that which is perceptible subjectively to one who is conscious and intersubjectively to other consciousnesses, is but the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface, in the shadowy depths, resides an oceanic unknown waiting to be plumbed.



In other words, unconscious experience, that which is below or beneath consciousness, is the ground of consciousness. In this sense, the unconscious comes first and is foundational. Consciousness, then, is a differentiated evolutionary outgrowth of an undifferentiated unconscious undergirding. If consciousness is the tip of the iceberg, the unconscious is all that lies under the water. According to Whitehead's philosophy, consciousness only occurs at the latest stage of "concrescence," where the term concrescence refers to becoming concrete.

What does concrescence mean? We can perhaps envision the process as a gooey substance, perhaps tree sap to use a particularly salient example, slowly solidifying. If you've ever gathered sap from a tree with your bare hands, you may be familiar with its tendency to stick stubbornly to clothing, hair, and skin alike. Yet when warmed under hot water, it returns to its viscous state, a sort of plasmic existence between solidity and liquidity. Perhaps this sort of transformation and shape-shifting could be what Whitehead was getting at with the process of concrescence.

In particular, concrescence refers to emerging from that which was previously without form. An actual entity, believe it or not, can manifest from this formlessness. It is essential to keep in mind, however, that actual entities, for Whitehead, were occasions of experience, consistent with his process-oriented approach. Such entities were not substantial in the usual sense of the term, but temporally serial composites, thus inextricably embedded in time as unfolding processes. Whitehead maintained that "actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent," waxing poetic.

Clear Consciousness

That may seem somewhat complex, indeed, and potentially unclear. For the sake of grounding such a philosophical perspective, we return to the quote in question, contextualizing it within what comes immediately thereafter. The passage continues:

"The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience. Also this character of our experience suggests that consciousness is the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base."

—Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, page 267

Here, the image of the iceberg is again indirectly invoked. In referring to consciousness as the "crown" of experience, we can see the tip of the iceberg emerge. Whitehead maintains that consciousness is not the base of experience, which instead lies in the unconscious.



Deep in this pulsing primordial, penumbral pre-consciousness, ideas ooze and ferment. We are perhaps brought back to the image of the wax or sap⁠— coagulating, decoagulating, and recoagulating dependent on the flux of temperature. The conscious and the unconscious undergo similar transformations.

Practical Purpose

Such notions are little nuggets of poetry, but what practical purpose can they serve? What relevance do Whitehead's notions have for us today?

Such contemplations on consciousness, even through a single paragraph from Whitehead, hopefully stir the primordial ooze of one's self-understanding. Left unstirred, uninterrogated, our unconscious remains unknown to us. By drawing on imagery such as the iceberg, light, or sap, perhaps the relationship between the conscious and unconscious can be illuminated and brought out of the dark.

Once we've illuminated the relationship between the conscious and unconscious dynamics of our experience, we stand to make significant changes in our thinking and behaviors. Habits previously left unquestioned may now be scrutinized in the light of day and skillfully evaluated for whether they conduce toward adaptive or maladaptive outcomes.

Those habits that cause us and others harm may then be critically probed and dissected. We may target their source in the unconscious, in the otherwise penumbral region of experience, and uproot them.

Simple, though by no means easy. How would you go about illuminating the connection between the conscious and unconscious? How would you transform yourself from the inside out? Leave us a comment below.