Whitehead, Sartre, Consciousness

According to Whitehead, the fundamental mode of experience is Feeling, of which there are two main kinds--Physical and Mental. A Physical Feeling is primarily a reception of an influx of energy, which the concepts of Mind subsequently operate upon in a variety of ways. On such way is the introduction of negative Feelings into experience, via a conceptual potential that is diverse in some respect from the given Physical actuality, a special, advanced case of which is Consciousness. Whitehead thus aligns himself with Bergson, and anticipates Sartre, in characterizing Consciousness as essentially entailing a negation of actuality. However, his more versatile scheme avoids some of Sartre's more awkward formulations. To begin with, for Whitehead, Consciousness is always subsequent to some positive, conformal Feeling, so the latter entails neither Consciousness, nor, hence, the 'non-thetic' Self-Consciousness that Sartre is forced to concoct, in order to explain how someone can be both absorbed in an external object, and, yet, apparently, simultaneously aware of what one is doing. Furthermore, the subsequent Feeling of a given Conscious Feeling is, in Whitehead's analysis, not a negation of it, but a conformal reproduction of it. Hence, the subsequent Feeling is, for Whitehead, not, strictly speaking, the 'Consciousness' of a Consciousness that, for Sartre, devolves into a labyrinth of reflecting Nothingnesses. In general, Whitehead's theory of Feelings exposes the oversimplifying reductionism of Sartre's theory of Consciousness.