Nature's Embrace

How much of what passes as science today is, in truth, faith.

PRELUDE 

The epilogue that ends this piece is a poem serving as commemoration to the Romantic poets of times past. These figures saw through the blind mechanized science of their time that underlay the industrial revolution; they lamented the devastation of Nature to which such restrictive, alienating beliefs conduced – and still conduce. One such poet, William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850), was inspiration to the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861 – 1947), and in the following passages, the Nature-allied metaphysics of Whitehead, along with those of Francis Herbert Bradley (1846 – 1924), will pervade the arguments put forth. These arguments seek to address the claims entertained in that poem, which in short, amount to this: 

1. Feeling is a perception. 

2. Sensing exists without sense organs. 

3. Sentience pervades all entities. 

4. There is an inflow of antecedent feelings from within and without. 

5. We exist within feelings; feelings do not merely exist within us. 

6. We absorb feelings as we wander through Nature. 

7. Our perception of Nature is real, not simulated. 

PURPOSE 

The purpose of this brief text is not to convince the reader of the extended perception and Nature infusion set forth, but rather the purpose is twofold: first, to introduce readers to another way of fathoming Nature, a way which they may freely decide to investigate further in intellectual fashion. The second purpose is practical: it is hoped that the text might help catalyze a perspective shift, enabling a new appreciation of countryside, world, and cosmos – a walk in Nature may hereafter attain new levels of splendor. 

PERCEPTION 

We commonly believe that perception and emotion are two distinct types of experience: the first tells us about the world around us – its sights, sounds, scents – the second tells us only about our own self via feelings such as joy, fear, wonder. Under this bifurcation, when we walk through woods or sense the rays of the Sun, our emotional state is mere endogenous reaction: The feelings originate in us – or so we may believe. But what if, along with sights, sounds, and scents, we also perceived sentiments? What if the feelings did not necessarily originate in us but outside of us? What if we considered feelings to exist within Nature and considered these feelings as flowing into and thereby constituting part of our current state of experience? 

PREHENSION 

Two objections might emerge here: firstly, that we can only perceive the world outside our body with our sense organs, and secondly, that feelings cannot exist within Nature except within those beings with brains. To the first objection, the ‘sensationalist doctrine,’ Whitehead argues that we perceive the immediate past moment of experience. One moment of fear flows into, thereby constituting in part the next moment; the first part of a sentence flows into the next, thereby constituting its meaning; the final note of a melody flows from the notes that preceded, thereby helping make that last one what it is. 

The context of the past constitutes the significance of the present; it fuses itself into the present. For the most, it is subconscious, primal feelings – such as fear or joy – that flow into and help make the present state of experience. Now, consider that we have as much evidence to believe in this perception of feelings – which Whitehead refers to as ‘prehension’ – as we have to believe in the perception of the sense organs. In the words of Whitehead: ‘It belongs to the ultimate texture of experience, with the same evidence as does presentational immediacy [sense-organ perception]’ (Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, ch. II). 

Therefore, the division of perception and emotion appears to be a mistake – emotion is a perception. Prehension also provides a parsimony such that perception is also causation (inflow), immediate memory, the subconscious, and the flow of time itself.  

The feelings that flow into the present come immediately from my body, but they do not always originate from my body. Feelings exist outside of my body, not only in other brain-based organisms but also in the insects, trees, fungi, bacteria, even in the rays of the Sun.  

POLLUTION 

This brings us to the second objection: that feelings cannot exist within Nature except for within those beings with brains. But: We have no evidence at all to believe that the necessary condition for experience is brain activity. We simply do not know what precisely it may be like to be a brainless starfish, jellyfish, oyster, single-celled organism, tree, flower, fungus, bacterium, molecule, or beyond. 

All we have are correlations between brain states and mental states, and even that is sketchy. We do not know what that correlation indicates, let alone do we have any known laws of Nature determining that relation. The belief that only the brain can occasion experience is thus not a scientific view, though it is often unwittingly dressed that way. It is a metaphysical belief – named ‘neuroessentialism’ – and a belief that renders Nature lifeless, insentient, without intrinsic value or purpose. 

It is the mainstream metaphysical belief of the last few centuries that has wreaked havoc upon Earth, treating Nature as a means and not an end. It is a dark faith, pollutive to the world. In its place, we endorse a brighter metaphysics that says, Nature lives. A leaf perceives light; a protist experiences prey. To insist that sense organs are necessary to sense or brains to experience is not based on evidence – and reason through parsimony sides against this dogma. 

PANEXPERIENTIALISM 

Let us expand our framework. There are experiential perceptions within Nature, even in the minutest of particles or pulses. Mind and matter are not distinct and evolve from simplicity to complexity, from atomic pulses to the pulses of human experience. There was no sudden cut in evolution where some shimmer of mind mysteriously emerged from some form of matter – mind was always part of matter, evolution proceeding degree by degree in the complexity of mind matter. 

Even a herald of the scientific revolution, Lord Chancellor of England Francis Bacon (1561 – 1626), asserted that ‘It is certain that all bodies [material entities] whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception ... . It is...a subject of very noble enquiry, to enquire of the more subtile [subtle] perceptions; for it is another key to open nature...’ (Silva Silvarum,  c.1626). It is a pity that this key was never tested in the ensuing scientific revolution, thus keeping Nature closed and locked away. As we can see, much of what passes as science today is, in truth, faith. 

If Nature is teeming with pulses of experience, and if we have perceptions not merely of the bodies of such experience (as matter-energy) but also inflowing perceptions, prehensions, of such experiences, then we have keys and access to both the outer and the inner aspects of Nature. We directly feel the outside world because the outside world’s feelings flow into us, thereby comprising aspects of our moments of experience. As we wander through sun-speckled verdant woods, glades, and glens, we find ourselves physically within such locations. Yet, we must now consider ourselves also mentally within: many of our feelings come from within the greater mental currents of feeling in which we swim. 

PARTS 

Consider the idea that your experiencing a feeling is not itself evidence that the feeling only exists within you. As F. H. Bradley stated, ‘I deny that the felt reality is shut up and confined within my feeling. … It may remain positively itself, and yet be absorbed in what is larger…something that is my private feeling, and also much more.’ (Appearance and Reality, ch. XXI: Solipsism) 

The feelings that flow into one’s present experience may also flow into others’ experience, and thus my feelings are but parts of greater streams of experience that flood Nature. These sentient flowing currents are not necessarily ‘selves’ but pulses of emotion, puffs of energy. In this manner, one directly senses the environment; one does not merely represent it – one is integrated within larger wholes, one’s experience is not a simulation but an integration. One experiences the real; one does not simulate the real – the outside comes inside, the inside does not project the outside. Simulation theories do not factor in the full range of perception, a complaint that Whitehead levels more generally: ‘Science only deals with half the evidence provided by human experience.’ (Modes of Thought, pt. III, §VIII) 

PERSPECTIVE 

Let us then entertain a perspective shift: We are part of Nature, Nature is part of us. Feelings flow throughout Nature, and we have a primal capacity to perceive such feelings – though the capacity to make these conscious may be an art that one can develop if one is not as naturally susceptible and sensitive as was Wordsworth, Whitman, Blake, or other such ‘Nature Mystics’ who more naturally perceive the inner life of things. Let us endorse or at least explore a metaphysics that enriches our phenomenology and revalues our approach to Nature Herself. 

POEM: EPILOGUE  

NATURE’S EMBRACE 

Through:— 

Hedge-bound moors, gold-gorsed verdant lands, 

Coastal rocks, zawns, to glistening ocean-kissed sands, 

Atop carns, quoits, down to spectral woods, glades and glens, 

I wandered. 

I felt, I wondered: 

What are these feelings felt in such environment? 

Are feelings within me or am I within feelings? 

Are feelings only sprung from within? 

Or are feelings perceptions of what lie without? 

Can thus we perceive both the matter of Nature external, 

But as well, the values of Nature internal? 

Is Nature merely seen, or does She see? 

Are feelings but the domain of the animal, hot-blooded or cold? 

Or do feelings suffuse and drench the plants, germs, and slime-mould? 

The grand-old oak, and without narcissism what would the daffodil be? 

Facing the Sun, the solar feeling of He. 

Is perception limited to the ‘sense organs’ of ear, eye, nose, tongue, flesh and skin?

Or does the leaf perceive light, mycelia the wet weather that spells delight?

Do we directly fuse and feel Nature, part of and as from within? 

Or do we watch Her as an inner show from afar, alienated, no contact, no kin?

Simulation or integration, is there interlace? 

Pray tell Nature, the nature of thine embrace.