Hearing the Whining of a Dog
Finding Value in the World through the Senses
Hearing the Whining of the Dog
"Hartshorne thinks that sensation 'is' a sort of caring for or valuing of things. The idea that value is added by oneself after the fact of sensation, rather than given in sensation itself, as a result of a connection with something 'out there' is both bad phenomenology and bad aesthetics, he thinks. In the whine of a dog, a listener intuits a feeling tone of displeasure 'in the whine itself.' Any distinction that may arise between sense quality and feeling tone is merely a verbal one."
— Daniel A. Dombrowski, Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), p. 88.
God Knows the World through Physical Prehensions
"According to Whitehead, the basic relationship in reality is "prehension," which in the most concrete form (called "physical prehension") is defined as "feeling of feeling,'' meaning the manner in which one subject feels the feelings of one or more other subjects. In other words, 'sympathy' in the most literal sense. And Whitehead used this word also. Moreover, God is said to know the world by physical prehensions, in other words by feeling the feelings of all the subjects composing that world."
- Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotenence and other Theological Mistakes, )SUNY Press). p, 27
It is commonplace, among some academics, to say that values are projected onto a value-neutral world "out there" after data from the world are perceived through the senses. Values are "merely" subjective.
And it is also common, among some Whiteheadian scholars, to reduce sense perception to what they call "experience in the mode of presentational immediacy" and then suggest that this mode of experience is inevitably detached from the world of living beings and the values they have for themselves. Such experience, they say, is primarily clinical or detached in nature: a mere observing of patterns of color or sound.
Some then add that values are experienced only when non-sensory feelings, derived from what they call "experience in the mode of causal efficacy,' are added in what they call "experience in the mode of symbolic reference." This can lead to the conclusion that sense perception, taken by itself, is devoid of value and disconnected from the inner lives of the beings we perceive.
Whether or not this is a faithful interpretation of Whitehead is another question. Hartshorne, according to Dombrowski in his classic text on Hartshorne's aesthetics, clearly rejects such a view. He rejects the modern assumption that sensation is a value-neutral reception of raw data to which the mind subsequently adds emotional or evaluative meaning.
Instead, sensation is itself value-laden. There is value or importance in the dog who is sensed, and there is value in our sensing of the dog, hearing her whine with our ears. To sense something is already to care about it, to find it important.
Of course, we experience many things through our senses: living beings, stars and planets, laptops, tables and chairs, and countless other realities. We experience them through our eyes, our ears, our nose, and our tongues, Buddhists say that even our minds are a kind of sense. Not all objects of experience are like the dog; not all are subjects of their own lives. But even to experience them, and to take note of them, is to find them important or relevant in some way. Even the barest act of attention is a kind of valuation of the thing itself, as worthy of our attention.
In the case of a whining dog, to sense the dog is also to sense its own self-evaluative activity. The dog is expressing emotion - perhaps distress and displeasure - and, in hearing the whine, we feel something of the dog's own feelings, the dog's own emotional state. We do not first register an acoustical pattern and then infer that the dog is having an emotion. Rather, we immediately hear the whine as expressing emotion.
From a Whiteheadian perspective, this is because perception is a form of prehension—a feeling of another's feeling. The dog's displeasure is not hidden behind the sound, requiring an intellectual inference to discover it. It is communicated through the sound itself and is directly felt, however partially, by the listener.
Hartshorne thus offers an alternative both to the reduction of perception to the reception of neutral sense-data and to the idea that values exist only in the minds of observers. Value is present in experience from the very beginning, including in sense-perception.
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It is interesting to wonder if the living unity of the universe, if God, also finds value in the world through sense experience. Many theologians insist that God does not have physical senses. God is a disembodied spirit. But they then add that God does "feel the feelings" of all sentient beings.
In Whitehead's philosophy these are called "physical feelings." ere "physical" does not as if they happen through the senses, but because they are directly felt or prehended in the divine life. God may not see, hear, touch, taste, or smell the world as humans do, but God does feel what we and other living beings feel, gathering the feelings of the world, indeed of the entire universe, into an ongoing and living whole, everlastingly.
Divine perception, too, is a type of feeling. And if God feels our own feeling, then God perceives our own experiences of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell, thus perceiving what it is like for us to have these experiences. And the same is true for dogs and other living beings. The whine of the dog is thus "heard" through our ears and through the dog's own experience as well. That whine, together with the dog's life, becomes part of the divine life. God does not project value onto the world. God discovers value in the world, declares it good, and invites us to see and feel the same. We already possess the equipment for this task: our senses.
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This is not to reduce our experience to sense experience. It includes much more: memory, anticipation, moods, acts of imagination, dream states, proprioception, and much else besides. In the house of experience there are many rooms. When we hear the whining of the dog, these other forms of experience no doubt come into play as well, shaping how we interpret, respond to, and feel the dog's suffering. Sense experience is revelatory of the 'outer' world, but it never occurs in isolation. It occurs as part of a larger whole. namely our own lived experience.
This lived experience is shaped by ideas, too. We may grow up in a culture that dismisses dogs as mere nuisances, unworthy of empathy, or in a culture that teaches us to recognize them as fellow creatures with lives of their own, capable of joy, fear, suffering, and affection. Our ideas do not replace experience, but they help interpret it, directing our attention toward some possibilities and away from others. They can also shut out what our senses reveal. An ideology, a prejudice, or a habit of mind may prevent us from recognizing what is directly before us: the reality of another creature's suffering and its value for itself.
What process philosophy offers is an outlook on life that welcomes revelations from the senses and encourages empathy as an authentic response to what those revelations disclose. The senses are not barriers separating us from the inner lives of other beings. They are among the primary ways we encounter those lives and discover their value.