Consciousness and Causation in Whitehead’s Phenomenology of Becoming
Anderson Weekes
November 18, 2009 DOI: 10.1515/9781438429427-018 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper |
|---|---|
| Topics | Philosophy of mind |
| Key points | Argues that Whitehead proposed a radical solution to the questions of consciousness's cause and our consciousness of causation by treating them as the same question, and that his system, though likely wrong, is a rigorous and comprehensive tool for exploring philosophical problems. |
Abstract
Consciousness and causation are topics that intersect in two obvious ways.We can ask what the cause of consciousness is and we can ask how we become conscious of causation.Both questions take us back to seminal fi gures in the history of modern philosophy and both questions continue to be the subject of intense debate.Early in the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead proposed a radical solution to both questions by treating them as the same question.It is lamentable that Whitehead's elegant solutions are so little discussed in the intellectual mainstream.Like the philosophy of Aristotle, Ockham, or Kant, Whitehead's is no doubt in the fi nal analysis all wrong.Nevertheless, like theirs, Whitehead's system of thought possesses a degree of rigor and analytic nuance, as well as a comprehensiveness of scope that makes it an ideal tool for exploring the structure of philosophical problems, which-just because they are philosophical-reveal their contours only through our failed attempts to solve them.This investigation seeks to make Whitehead's consolidated answer to these two important philosophical questions more accessible to the intellectual mainstream by carefully relating his theorems to well-established issues and ideas in Continental and Anglo-American philosophy and the history of philosophy as they understand it.I limit my discussion to the concepts of consciousness and causation as we have inherited them from the early modern tradition: consciousness as a form of seemingly private self-presence attending all our encounters with objects, real and imaginary; causation as a logically necessary or somehow physically impelled diachronic sequence of empirical phenomena, that is, effi cient causation.
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