‘It is all too easy to define aesthesis according to the misplaced concreteness, so prevalent among modern philosophers of both the empiricist and rationalist schools, which has it that our primary form of sensory experience is of bare patches of qualia free of all relations. Whitehead called this mode of aesthesis ‘presentational immediacy’ or ‘sense-perception,’ and contrasted it with the more primordial mode of ‘causal efficacy’ or ‘sense-reception’ (Whitehead 1979: 113-114). The latter mode of aesthesis, as its name suggests, directly links to and reiterates in our present experience the experiences of past actualities in our causal lineage. That present occasions of human experience are linked to past actualities via such causal lineages contradicts both the Humean dismissal of necessary connection and the Kantian transcendental paradigm, wherein aesthesis is ‘mere appearance’ and so ontologically epiphenomenal. According to Whitehead, modern philosophers have explained experience in a ‘topsy-turvy fashion, the wrong end first’: because presentational immediacy (i.e., a derivative appearance projected by the subject) provides us with clear and distinct ideas that are accessible to conceptualization by the understanding, it has been given genetic priority, when in fact, causal efficacy (i.e., the primordial inheritance of superjective feelings) deserves this honor (Whitehead 1979: 162.). ‘The philosophy of organism is the inversion of Kant’s philosophy,’ according to Whitehead, in that while Kant endeavors to construe experience as a process whereby ‘subjective data pass into the appearance of an objective world,’ Whitehead’s philosophy of organism describes experience as a process whereby the order of the objectively felt data of the world pass into and provide intensity for the realization of a subject (Whitehead 1979: 88). In short, in Kant’s philosophy ‘the world emerges from the subject,’ while ‘for the philosophy of organism, the subject emerges from the world’

Matthew Segall