Whitehead on Causality and Perception

Whitehead’s notion of ‘causal efficacy’ provides a bridge from epistemology to ontology, or to what Whitehead calls cosmology. It inverts the priority of epistemology over causality as established by Hume and Kant, for even to raise the question of how we know is already to have accepted the operations of causality within the mind, in the form of the “conformation of present fact to immediate past.” Hume’s doubt as to whether and how we can perceive causal processes at all is therefore misplaced; for this doubt rests upon the illicit presupposition of a mind separated from what it perceives, or of presentational immediacy detached from the matrix of causal efficacy within which it arises. This chapter traces Whitehead’s argument about symbolism and causal efficacy, and show its relevance to contemporary philosophical debates (in both analytic and continental circles) about grounds, cognition, and causality. It further suggests that Whitehead’s insistence that perception is a species of causality also implies the priority of sentience over vitality. In other words, perception and feeling are among the necessary conditions of possibility for life, rather than (as is usually assumed in contemporary doctrines of emergence and of neo-vitalism) the reverse.