Lures for Feeling
Memory
Propositions preserve possibilities embodied in the past, carrying them forward into new occasions of experience. Through stories, rituals, photographs, and works of art, they keep alive ways of feeling and understanding that might otherwise be forgotten.
Example: A photograph of a deceased friend preserves the possibility of remembrance and grief long after the original experience has passed.
Empathy
Propositions cultivate empathy by inviting us to imaginatively enter worlds of experience beyond our own. They help us appreciate the feelings, hopes, fears, and struggles of other people and other forms of life.
Example: A novel about a refugee's journey helps readers imaginatively participate in experiences they have never personally undergone.
Understanding
Propositions deepen understanding by enabling us to grasp possibilities of feeling, valuing, and perceiving that are not part of our direct experience. Through imaginative reenactment, they transform information into insight.
Example: A memoir of living with a chronic illness can help readers understand dimensions of suffering and resilience that statistics alone cannot convey.
Contrast
Propositions enrich experience by introducing contrasts that challenge habitual assumptions and reveal overlooked possibilities. They bring different perspectives, values, and ways of seeing into relationship with one another.
Example: A philosophical argument that questions a long-held belief may expose tensions and alternatives that had previously remained invisible.
Novelty
Propositions introduce novelty by presenting possibilities that have not yet been realized. They lure individuals and societies toward new forms of feeling, thought, action, and community.
Example: A vision of ecological civilization can inspire people to imagine and create social arrangements that do not yet exist.
Propositions preserve possibilities embodied in the past, carrying them forward into new occasions of experience. Through stories, rituals, photographs, and works of art, they keep alive ways of feeling and understanding that might otherwise be forgotten.
Example: A photograph of a deceased friend preserves the possibility of remembrance and grief long after the original experience has passed.
Empathy
Propositions cultivate empathy by inviting us to imaginatively enter worlds of experience beyond our own. They help us appreciate the feelings, hopes, fears, and struggles of other people and other forms of life.
Example: A novel about a refugee's journey helps readers imaginatively participate in experiences they have never personally undergone.
Understanding
Propositions deepen understanding by enabling us to grasp possibilities of feeling, valuing, and perceiving that are not part of our direct experience. Through imaginative reenactment, they transform information into insight.
Example: A memoir of living with a chronic illness can help readers understand dimensions of suffering and resilience that statistics alone cannot convey.
Contrast
Propositions enrich experience by introducing contrasts that challenge habitual assumptions and reveal overlooked possibilities. They bring different perspectives, values, and ways of seeing into relationship with one another.
Example: A philosophical argument that questions a long-held belief may expose tensions and alternatives that had previously remained invisible.
Novelty
Propositions introduce novelty by presenting possibilities that have not yet been realized. They lure individuals and societies toward new forms of feeling, thought, action, and community.
Example: A vision of ecological civilization can inspire people to imagine and create social arrangements that do not yet exist.
Propositions as Lures for Feeling
In Whitehead's philosophy, propositions are among the eight categories of existence. The others are actual entities, eternal objects, prehensions, subjective forms, contrasts, nexus, and multiplicities. Although propositions often receive less attention than actual entities or eternal objects, they play an indispensable role in Whitehead's understanding of experience, creativity, and cultural life.
Whitehead famously describes propositions as "lures for feeling." Unlike actual entities, propositions are not concrete occasions of experience, and unlike eternal objects, they are not pure possibilities considered in abstraction from the world. Rather, a proposition relates a possibility to an actuality. It presents a way in which the world might be felt, interpreted, valued, or transformed. A proposition is thus neither a mere fact nor a mere possibility. It is a possibility as relevant to a particular situation.
Because propositions function as lures for feeling, they possess a unique form of causal efficacy. They do not operate by transmitting energy from the past into the present, as occurs in the vector transmission of feeling. Instead, they beckon. They invite. They suggest. They offer possibilities for realization. A story, a memory, a ritual, a philosophical idea, a work of art, a scientific hypothesis, or a religious symbol can all function propositionally by presenting possibilities that may or may not be actualized.
In this respect, propositions are among the principal vehicles through which empathy, understanding, contrast, and novelty enter experience. They preserve possibilities from the past, introduce us to worlds beyond our own, challenge settled assumptions, and lure us toward unrealized futures. If actual entities are the building blocks of reality and eternal objects are the pure forms of possibility, propositions are the bridges between them. They are among the primary means by which the world becomes richer, more complex, more imaginative, and more creative.
Whitehead famously describes propositions as "lures for feeling." Unlike actual entities, propositions are not concrete occasions of experience, and unlike eternal objects, they are not pure possibilities considered in abstraction from the world. Rather, a proposition relates a possibility to an actuality. It presents a way in which the world might be felt, interpreted, valued, or transformed. A proposition is thus neither a mere fact nor a mere possibility. It is a possibility as relevant to a particular situation.
Because propositions function as lures for feeling, they possess a unique form of causal efficacy. They do not operate by transmitting energy from the past into the present, as occurs in the vector transmission of feeling. Instead, they beckon. They invite. They suggest. They offer possibilities for realization. A story, a memory, a ritual, a philosophical idea, a work of art, a scientific hypothesis, or a religious symbol can all function propositionally by presenting possibilities that may or may not be actualized.
In this respect, propositions are among the principal vehicles through which empathy, understanding, contrast, and novelty enter experience. They preserve possibilities from the past, introduce us to worlds beyond our own, challenge settled assumptions, and lure us toward unrealized futures. If actual entities are the building blocks of reality and eternal objects are the pure forms of possibility, propositions are the bridges between them. They are among the primary means by which the world becomes richer, more complex, more imaginative, and more creative.
Channels of Memory, Empathy,
Contrast, Novelty, and Understanding
A Friend's Death and the Return of Grief
Imagine that you have just received news that a close friend has died. In the first few minutes after hearing the news, you feel grief. Five seconds later, you are still grieving. The grief of the immediate past is being carried into the present. Think of this as direct inheritance or, in Whitehead's language, a vector transmission of feeling. The grief you feel now is not merely similar to the grief you felt a moment ago; it is, in part, the continuation of that earlier feeling.
Now imagine that several weeks have passed. The acute grief has subsided. One afternoon you come across an old photograph of your friend. Looking at the photograph, you remember the loss and begin to feel grief again. This time the earlier grief is not being directly transmitted into the present. Rather, the photograph awakens the possibility of grief, and that possibility is actualized anew. The earlier grief is not inherited; it is reenacted.
Feeling the Past
The example of grief reveals two different ways that emotions can be present in experience. The first is through direct inheritance. Feelings from the immediate past are transmitted into the present through what Whitehead calls the vector transmission of feeling. The present moment is not cut off from the past. It emerges through its inheritance of the past.
In Whitehead's philosophy, this inheritance is the foundation of causation. The past exerts its efficacy upon the present by transmitting feelings, energies, and patterns of experience. What we experience now is shaped in part by what has already been experienced.
Remembering and Reenacting
The second form of emotional presence is reenactment. Here a feeling is not directly inherited but actualized anew through a possibility. The photograph of the deceased friend does not transmit grief from the past into the present. Rather, it awakens the possibility of grief and invites its renewed embodiment.
Thus we have two ways that emotions can be present in experience: through direct inheritance from the past and through the reenactment of possibilities. Consider now the second form and, more specifically, the possibility that is both felt and reenacted. What is its ontological status?
Possibilities and Their Reality
In Whitehead's philosophy, the possibility can be understood in two related ways: as an eternal object or as a proposition. Eternal objects are pure possibilities for definiteness. Whitehead distinguishes between two broad kinds. Eternal objects of the objective species concern geometrical, mathematical, and extensive relations among actual entities. They include such features as shapes, patterns, spatial relations, rhythms, and other forms of objective order.
Eternal objects of the subjective species concern modes of feeling and valuation. They include emotions and affective qualities such as grief, joy, tenderness, courage, reverence, wonder, serenity, resentment, longing, compassion, and countless other ways of feeling. In the present example, grief can be understood as an eternal object of the subjective species—a pure possibility for a certain kind of feeling.
The Beckoning Power of Propositions
A proposition is more concrete than an eternal object. It is an eternal object as related to a particular actuality or set of actualities. In the present example, the photograph does not merely present the abstract possibility of grief. It presents the possibility of grieving for this particular friend whose life and death are remembered through the image. The proposition is thus not simply grief as such, but grief-for-this-loss.
This distinction is important because what lures us in experience is usually not an eternal object by itself. We are rarely moved by pure possibilities in the abstract. Rather, we are moved by propositions. A photograph, a story, a piece of music, a ritual, or a memory presents a possibility as relevant to a particular situation. It invites a certain way of feeling, perceiving, or responding. In Whitehead's language, it functions as a lure for feeling.
The photograph of the deceased friend thus functions as a proposition. It proposes a way of feeling. It invites grief, remembrance, gratitude, sorrow, perhaps even joy. Whether that possibility is actualized depends on the response of the experiencing subject. The proposition does not compel. It beckons. It offers a possibility that may or may not be embodied in the present moment.
Learning New Ways to Feel
The example just given concerns a possibility that had already been embodied in the person's own experience. The grief awakened by the photograph was not wholly unfamiliar. It had been directly felt before and was now being reenacted. But propositions are not only evocative; they are also educative. They do not merely awaken feelings already present within us. They can introduce us to possibilities of feeling that we have never previously embodied.
Through stories, rituals, music, memories, and works of art, we encounter new possibilities for experience. We may come to understand grief we have never suffered, courage we have never displayed, compassion we have never practiced, or wonder we have never known. In this way propositions enlarge the emotional and imaginative horizons of experience. They educate feeling by introducing us to new ways of being in the world.
The educative power of propositions lies not only in their ability to evoke feeling but also in their ability to foster understanding. Through stories, rituals, music, memories, and works of art, we are invited to imaginatively reenact possibilities embodied in the lives of others. In this reenactment we gain insight into worlds of experience beyond our own. We do not literally become the other person, but we develop a sympathetic understanding of what it might be like to inhabit their world. Propositions thus become channels not only of feeling but also of understanding.
The Humanities as Schools of Empathy and Laboratories of Novelty
The humanities are often defended as schools of empathy. Literature, history, philosophy, religion, poetry, drama, music, and the arts help us enter imaginatively into worlds beyond our own immediate experience. Through them, we encounter possibilities for feeling and understanding that might otherwise remain inaccessible. They enlarge our capacity for empathy by inviting us to imagine the lives of other people, other cultures, and other historical periods.
Yet the humanities do more than cultivate empathy. They also cultivate novelty.
Individuals and societies tend to become canalized into habitual ways of feeling, thinking, perceiving, and acting. These patterns provide continuity and stability, but they can also become rigid and stagnant. The humanities repeatedly expose us to propositions that challenge these settled patterns. A poem may reveal an unexpected perspective. A novel may call into question assumptions we have long taken for granted. A philosophical argument may disrupt familiar habits of thought. A religious symbol may disclose dimensions of reality that conventional categories cannot contain. A work of art may awaken possibilities that have never before entered consciousness.
In this way, the humanities serve as agents of uncanalization. They loosen the grip of inherited assumptions and open experience to alternative possibilities. They help us see that the world can be otherwise than we have imagined it. They introduce novelty into feeling, perception, thought, and action.
The humanities preserve memory, generate imagination, deepen understanding, and open pathways to novelty. They help societies remember what they have been and envision what they might become. Through the propositions they embody, they function as lures toward unrealized futures.
The humanities are schools of empathy because they enlarge our capacity to feel with others. They are schools of understanding because they deepen our insight into worlds beyond our own. And they are laboratories of novelty because they introduce possibilities that challenge settled habits of thought and feeling.
Feeling with the Community of Life
The importance of propositions extends beyond the human sphere. Given the wisdom of panexperientialism, which proposes that something like experience is present in all concrescing subjects and not in human beings alone, we can consider the possibility that other creatures—other animals, for example—have feelings that we can learn about through symbols, rituals, stories, music, and works of art.
We cannot literally become a wolf, an elephant, a crow, or an octopus. Yet artistic, literary, and religious forms can function as propositions that invite us to imagine modes of feeling analogous to those embodied in other forms of life. In this way, propositions can deepen not only interpersonal empathy but also ecological empathy, enlarging our sense of kinship with the wider community of life.
Breaking the Spell of Habit
One of the most important functions of propositions is their ability to interrupt stagnant modes of thought and feeling. Human beings naturally fall into routines. Communities develop habits, institutions, assumptions, and conventions that shape experience. These habits are often useful, but they can also become constricting.
Propositions can disrupt these settled patterns. They can reveal alternatives. They can disclose possibilities that had previously remained hidden. In doing so, they open the door to creativity and transformation.
Lures Toward Novelty
For Whitehead, propositions are among the principal vehicles of novelty in experience. They introduce possibilities that are not reducible to the mere repetition of the past. They lure individuals and societies toward richer forms of realization.
This is why propositions are so important for cultural and spiritual life. They keep experience open. They prevent inherited patterns from hardening into prisons. They encourage adventure, creativity, and growth.
Living Between Memory and Possibility
For Whitehead, propositions possess a genuine causal efficacy, even though they do not operate through efficient causation alone. They do not push from behind in the manner of vector transmission. Instead, they beckon from ahead. They invite imaginative exploration, sympathetic understanding, and creative transformation. They preserve what has been felt, disclose what might yet be felt, and open experience to possibilities not yet realized.
Human life unfolds through the interplay of these two forms of causation: the inheritance of what has been and the lure of what might become. Through inheritance we receive the past. Through propositions we explore possibilities. In this way empathy is deepened, understanding enlarged, and novelty introduced into experience. Reality itself advances through the interplay of memory and possibility, of vector transmission and proposition, of the past that is received and the future that is imagined.
Imagine that you have just received news that a close friend has died. In the first few minutes after hearing the news, you feel grief. Five seconds later, you are still grieving. The grief of the immediate past is being carried into the present. Think of this as direct inheritance or, in Whitehead's language, a vector transmission of feeling. The grief you feel now is not merely similar to the grief you felt a moment ago; it is, in part, the continuation of that earlier feeling.
Now imagine that several weeks have passed. The acute grief has subsided. One afternoon you come across an old photograph of your friend. Looking at the photograph, you remember the loss and begin to feel grief again. This time the earlier grief is not being directly transmitted into the present. Rather, the photograph awakens the possibility of grief, and that possibility is actualized anew. The earlier grief is not inherited; it is reenacted.
Feeling the Past
The example of grief reveals two different ways that emotions can be present in experience. The first is through direct inheritance. Feelings from the immediate past are transmitted into the present through what Whitehead calls the vector transmission of feeling. The present moment is not cut off from the past. It emerges through its inheritance of the past.
In Whitehead's philosophy, this inheritance is the foundation of causation. The past exerts its efficacy upon the present by transmitting feelings, energies, and patterns of experience. What we experience now is shaped in part by what has already been experienced.
Remembering and Reenacting
The second form of emotional presence is reenactment. Here a feeling is not directly inherited but actualized anew through a possibility. The photograph of the deceased friend does not transmit grief from the past into the present. Rather, it awakens the possibility of grief and invites its renewed embodiment.
Thus we have two ways that emotions can be present in experience: through direct inheritance from the past and through the reenactment of possibilities. Consider now the second form and, more specifically, the possibility that is both felt and reenacted. What is its ontological status?
Possibilities and Their Reality
In Whitehead's philosophy, the possibility can be understood in two related ways: as an eternal object or as a proposition. Eternal objects are pure possibilities for definiteness. Whitehead distinguishes between two broad kinds. Eternal objects of the objective species concern geometrical, mathematical, and extensive relations among actual entities. They include such features as shapes, patterns, spatial relations, rhythms, and other forms of objective order.
Eternal objects of the subjective species concern modes of feeling and valuation. They include emotions and affective qualities such as grief, joy, tenderness, courage, reverence, wonder, serenity, resentment, longing, compassion, and countless other ways of feeling. In the present example, grief can be understood as an eternal object of the subjective species—a pure possibility for a certain kind of feeling.
The Beckoning Power of Propositions
A proposition is more concrete than an eternal object. It is an eternal object as related to a particular actuality or set of actualities. In the present example, the photograph does not merely present the abstract possibility of grief. It presents the possibility of grieving for this particular friend whose life and death are remembered through the image. The proposition is thus not simply grief as such, but grief-for-this-loss.
This distinction is important because what lures us in experience is usually not an eternal object by itself. We are rarely moved by pure possibilities in the abstract. Rather, we are moved by propositions. A photograph, a story, a piece of music, a ritual, or a memory presents a possibility as relevant to a particular situation. It invites a certain way of feeling, perceiving, or responding. In Whitehead's language, it functions as a lure for feeling.
The photograph of the deceased friend thus functions as a proposition. It proposes a way of feeling. It invites grief, remembrance, gratitude, sorrow, perhaps even joy. Whether that possibility is actualized depends on the response of the experiencing subject. The proposition does not compel. It beckons. It offers a possibility that may or may not be embodied in the present moment.
Learning New Ways to Feel
The example just given concerns a possibility that had already been embodied in the person's own experience. The grief awakened by the photograph was not wholly unfamiliar. It had been directly felt before and was now being reenacted. But propositions are not only evocative; they are also educative. They do not merely awaken feelings already present within us. They can introduce us to possibilities of feeling that we have never previously embodied.
Through stories, rituals, music, memories, and works of art, we encounter new possibilities for experience. We may come to understand grief we have never suffered, courage we have never displayed, compassion we have never practiced, or wonder we have never known. In this way propositions enlarge the emotional and imaginative horizons of experience. They educate feeling by introducing us to new ways of being in the world.
The educative power of propositions lies not only in their ability to evoke feeling but also in their ability to foster understanding. Through stories, rituals, music, memories, and works of art, we are invited to imaginatively reenact possibilities embodied in the lives of others. In this reenactment we gain insight into worlds of experience beyond our own. We do not literally become the other person, but we develop a sympathetic understanding of what it might be like to inhabit their world. Propositions thus become channels not only of feeling but also of understanding.
The Humanities as Schools of Empathy and Laboratories of Novelty
The humanities are often defended as schools of empathy. Literature, history, philosophy, religion, poetry, drama, music, and the arts help us enter imaginatively into worlds beyond our own immediate experience. Through them, we encounter possibilities for feeling and understanding that might otherwise remain inaccessible. They enlarge our capacity for empathy by inviting us to imagine the lives of other people, other cultures, and other historical periods.
Yet the humanities do more than cultivate empathy. They also cultivate novelty.
Individuals and societies tend to become canalized into habitual ways of feeling, thinking, perceiving, and acting. These patterns provide continuity and stability, but they can also become rigid and stagnant. The humanities repeatedly expose us to propositions that challenge these settled patterns. A poem may reveal an unexpected perspective. A novel may call into question assumptions we have long taken for granted. A philosophical argument may disrupt familiar habits of thought. A religious symbol may disclose dimensions of reality that conventional categories cannot contain. A work of art may awaken possibilities that have never before entered consciousness.
In this way, the humanities serve as agents of uncanalization. They loosen the grip of inherited assumptions and open experience to alternative possibilities. They help us see that the world can be otherwise than we have imagined it. They introduce novelty into feeling, perception, thought, and action.
The humanities preserve memory, generate imagination, deepen understanding, and open pathways to novelty. They help societies remember what they have been and envision what they might become. Through the propositions they embody, they function as lures toward unrealized futures.
The humanities are schools of empathy because they enlarge our capacity to feel with others. They are schools of understanding because they deepen our insight into worlds beyond our own. And they are laboratories of novelty because they introduce possibilities that challenge settled habits of thought and feeling.
Feeling with the Community of Life
The importance of propositions extends beyond the human sphere. Given the wisdom of panexperientialism, which proposes that something like experience is present in all concrescing subjects and not in human beings alone, we can consider the possibility that other creatures—other animals, for example—have feelings that we can learn about through symbols, rituals, stories, music, and works of art.
We cannot literally become a wolf, an elephant, a crow, or an octopus. Yet artistic, literary, and religious forms can function as propositions that invite us to imagine modes of feeling analogous to those embodied in other forms of life. In this way, propositions can deepen not only interpersonal empathy but also ecological empathy, enlarging our sense of kinship with the wider community of life.
Breaking the Spell of Habit
One of the most important functions of propositions is their ability to interrupt stagnant modes of thought and feeling. Human beings naturally fall into routines. Communities develop habits, institutions, assumptions, and conventions that shape experience. These habits are often useful, but they can also become constricting.
Propositions can disrupt these settled patterns. They can reveal alternatives. They can disclose possibilities that had previously remained hidden. In doing so, they open the door to creativity and transformation.
Lures Toward Novelty
For Whitehead, propositions are among the principal vehicles of novelty in experience. They introduce possibilities that are not reducible to the mere repetition of the past. They lure individuals and societies toward richer forms of realization.
This is why propositions are so important for cultural and spiritual life. They keep experience open. They prevent inherited patterns from hardening into prisons. They encourage adventure, creativity, and growth.
Living Between Memory and Possibility
For Whitehead, propositions possess a genuine causal efficacy, even though they do not operate through efficient causation alone. They do not push from behind in the manner of vector transmission. Instead, they beckon from ahead. They invite imaginative exploration, sympathetic understanding, and creative transformation. They preserve what has been felt, disclose what might yet be felt, and open experience to possibilities not yet realized.
Human life unfolds through the interplay of these two forms of causation: the inheritance of what has been and the lure of what might become. Through inheritance we receive the past. Through propositions we explore possibilities. In this way empathy is deepened, understanding enlarged, and novelty introduced into experience. Reality itself advances through the interplay of memory and possibility, of vector transmission and proposition, of the past that is received and the future that is imagined.