Feeling as Creation: Affect and Tertiary Qualities

The chapter focuses on the early modern distinction between primary, secondary, and tertiary qualities. The chapter first discusses Quentin Meillassoux’s efforts to rehabilitate the primary-secondary distinction in his critique of “correlationism”. Despite Meillassoux’s claim that correlationism applies to all modern philosophy since Kant, the chapter argues that Whitehead’s reworking of the primary-secondary-tertiary distinction, based in his unusual reading of Locke, avoids the correlationist charge while opening a different kind of realism. This reworking amounts to an ontological inversion of the three qualities, such that tertiary quality becomes ontologically primary. A key consequence is that “feeling,” for Whitehead, names a metaphysical process constitutive of the real. This is neither a humanist nor psychological claim, but rather a metaphysical one. The chapter closes by situating Deleuze and Guattari’s use of affect along similar lines. However, where Whitehead is largely content with a technical metaphysical result, Deleuze and Guattari explore ensuing existential possibilities in their concept of “becoming-imperceptible”.