The Prehensile Mind

October 19th, 2006 Fred McVittie

Alfred North Whitehead makes extensive use of the construction of knowledge using tactile metaphors in his notion of ‘prehension’;

“Whitehead said that the actualities of which the world is composed are related to each other by means of prehensions—indeed, the actualities are their prehensions. To “prehend” is to “grasp” or to take account of other actualities. Prehending is not limited to human beings: as nonhuman forms of experience exist, so do nonhuman forms of prehension. Every actual entity, including nonhuman ones, is related to the world by means of prehensions. The particular way in which each actual entity prehends the world, the how of its “grasping,” Whitehead called the “subjective form” of the prehension, by which he meant its affective tone. Thus, a prehension is a “feeling of feeling.””
http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/Hartshorne/Viney/3.html

As a monkey has a prehensile tail which it uses to grasp distant objects and bring them into contact with its self, so we have a prehensile mind that performs a similar trick with the conceptual experiences of our world.

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