Originary Symbolism: Whitehead, Deleuze and the Process View on Perception

Abstract

Whitehead’s accounts of perception are arguably amongst his most important philosophical legacies. His notions of ‘causal efficacy’, ‘presentational immediacy’, and ‘symbolic reference’ offer a direct challenge to the various schools of thought derived from Hume and Kant, in which causation is seen as a pale derivation from the ‘sensationalist’ vivid impressions of immediate atomic sense-data presented to consciousness. Whitehead ties his account of perception not only to a certain conception of causality and time, but also to a generalized or originary account of symbolism. Originary symbolism is the power to affect or be affected, an exposure to what happens as the condition not just for language, experience, or even God in Whitehead’s sense, but for all becoming and life.This critique of ‘natural perception’ and the generalization of an ‘originary’ differential structure is also taken up and developed in great detail and complexity in the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Contrasting Whitehead’s account of originary symbolism with Deleuze will enable the drawing out of some of the radical innovations and variations of the process view with regard to perception and life.