“It is by reason of the body, with its miracle of order, that the treasures of the past environment are poured into the living occasion […] It receives from the past; it lives in the present. It is shaken by its intensities of private feeling […] In its turn, this culmination of bodily life transmits itself as an element of novelty throughout the avenues of the body. Its sole use to the body is its vivid originality: it is the organ of novelty.”
(Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, V-III)
Nothing that can be written counts as part of an active experience. What we perceive cannot be measured in a proposition or a numerical statement, which is an obvious thing to say. What is not so obvious is to understand why those things that do count as part of an experience are all internal to it or figure in its immediate context.
The fixation with taking the thing done by the thing indicated, and its subsequent elevation into an end-in-itself (with some overarching narrative of dubious value), is just one more example of the continuous falsification of what is readily available in biological life for the self-fulfilling struggle of both, denying it and embracing its copy as the only viable alternative. The overall effect of that process has been commonly termed progress. The only way to make sense of that word, famously elaborated by Gould, is as the never ending unfolding of variation, of sheer mutability; not because we are conspicuously aiming towards something, but because we have good reason to believe that on the opposite end there is a very concrete solid wall. Progress, in cosmological time, has been shown to be entirely inevitable from the moment there is something rather than nothing. From that point of view, teleological constructs are always the skewed illusions of an unprivileged and self-glorified observer.
Every instance of attentive experience is a form of self-realization, where certain level of order has been reached, an order that did not exist before and might not exist afterwards. Here, self-realization is nothing more that the intrinsically creative aspect of biological activity, not only that which is commonly associated with consciousness, but for all biological activity that cannot be “reduced” to a mere biochemical process. Why do we think of this activity as being “creative”? Everyone associates the capacity to create with the ability to get something out of nothing. The production of a loom, with its intricate pattern of figures and colours is something more that the interlacing of uniform lines of matter, it is an objective element of the physical world that did not exist before and cannot be expressed by its constituent parts. We do not tend to think of the loom as its parts, but on its entire manifest nature; and in those cases where we do look at the product from its parts, the figure is immediately lost, the magic is gone.
This is essentially the same triadic movement of implicit integration that Polanyi refers to as the active process of generating meaning in human experience. We attend to the environment as an active space through those subsidiary cues that go thought our own bodies, that pierce through our senses, and we discover ourselves in it. That is in fact the definition of a living organism (it will never be the definition of a machine for example). This self-realization can only take place as a sort of “secondary step” from attending to something else, in this case an active environment (that might explain why in isolation chambers our mind continues to re-create and make up its own perceptual inputs).
Even though a lot has been said in the past in psychological terms as to the nature of the active experience, this has been done on a purely functional level, without much regard for what is intrinsic to the experience itself (that for which we might not understand the experience as taking place, in the immediate sense of an “extensive connection” between something and something, and not just as an activity that develops thorough time with a more or less defined character), from that which is considered external to it. What is intrinsic is entirely subsidiary, as already mentioned we get to be on the activity through those cues, the infinite number of them, but they are not the recipient of our focused attention. There might be a sense of weight, of material resistance or strength in every action, a perception of transition from one dimensional space to another, but they never form the complete thing, they never exhaust the vivid pattern. The experience is whatever integrates that into a meaningful action.
Some authors have highlighted that for certain types of valuable experiences we need a specific set of goals, or an immediate sense of feedback and control over the evolving process based on some pre-defined rules. These are misleading elements, from the moment they do not (and cannot) form part of the organic experience itself. What is it that is ultimately discoverable though goals or rules other than the realization of some externally defined concept, for as long as that feedback pertains to nothing else but the fulfilment of those goals or rules?
Let’s take for example the abstract idea of speed as a goal and compare it with the somehow more blurred, but entirely concrete idea of personal technique. We tend to consider the former as an objective element of reality and the latter as a subjective prehension of the efficiency of movement. It just happens to be the case that one has a convenient way to be indicated while the other one does not. But what is it that indicates? It is entirely unknown; its nature is always circular. We define velocity as a measure of the good, because the good can be defined as a measure of velocity, and then abandon ourselves to the enclosure of that arbitrary rule. And there is no escape, nothing gets done, one of the means has become the end.
We do have an experiential understanding of speed in all its infinite gradations, but that is not what the value indicates. Similarly, we do have a primitive feeling of force and energy, but that is not what the scalar form of f and the measure of E indicate. The force that we feel is always a force towards something in space, and might not be entirely that even, but maybe something passively attended to, something endured; and, similarly, the energy that we encounter seems to have the form of a potential for something imagined or actual, the possibility of some completed action. On the other hand, technique is squarely in the middle of that thing we call experience, it is nothing more than the realization of an action through space, it is the creative aspect of any physical activity. Technique, in that sense, contains everything.
All that can be said about an externally driven activity is that is either meaningless or full of meaning. When it is full of meaning it is already complete, it either happened in the past as an idea taking hold of us or it happened in the past as the completion of all the steps necessary to fulfil that idea, each of them also satisfied of complete meaning; or both things in concordance. That is the nature of the truism that if you only chase something, it already happened; it is in the past. The third aspect of that intuition is non other than the already classical concept (see Linji/Rinzai’s Record for example) of “that”, or arriving to “that”, as being too late. Reality, on the other hand, always moves from the made to the making as a continuously creative process that sustains itself. This movement is entirely un-productive, not because nothing gets produced (a product might obtain), but because production is not in the focus.
When we say that this external performance is meaningless, we say that it has not created any new meaning. An active experience is essentially a creative human process, it is an act of discovery every step of the way. In that sense all experiences are only more or less meaningful, they are only more or less given; they are not complete. Now, there is nothing standing against them being incompletely external, this is not a contradiction. It just happens to be the case that nature has not provided us with two parallel experiencing selves, or two parallel working brains (and in some cases, it has not even provided us with one).
The best we can hope for, as Whitehead somewhere mentions, is to be consistent, to be coherent with those things that life systems experience and value, and those things that are perceived as relating to an external world. Where does that lead to is entirely to be decided. But one thing is clear, as it has been explained elsewhere it is hard to have two parallel representations that are, to a large extent, incompatible and contradictory. And what is even worst, the effect of that approach is entirely visible. There is little more that needs to be added.
Coming back to a final point about the nature of human activity, without the need to add any unnecessary complexity, there are only three alternatives for an active experience in the material world: Going through space (1), being in an expandable medium. Nature has not given us the third option.
(1) The realization of space has been described as the most immediate feeling experienced by inmates being liberated from a concentration camp. This finding of an abstract location, a "region", where something is realized and in its turn realizes (in that case freedom), is equally key to the development of St Augustine's and Descartes' worldview. Ultimately though, abstract concepts remain and we might want instead to refer to a "place" or "topos" to indicate that which concretely creates and is created by an evolving activity. Volver
