THE ANTITHESIS BETWEEN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE
 
The antithesis between the public and the private is found at every stage in the analysis of an actuality. For example, as I perceive my hand every prehension-skin, color, underlying bone, the long length and grace of my grace of my fingers, their seeming lack of power-has public origins beyond the fingers in question.  At the same time I know I have used my hand as a model for drawing hands as symbols of touching, or of trying to understand by reaching out. This is an obviously private aspect of my experience, and yet one that I cannot understand without recourse to public meanings. Whitehead subjects this situation to his theory of the prehensive unification of events.

According to Whitehead, the actual entities attending my hand represent overviews, or superjects. They represent a passage from known public facts to novel public facts; for example, the known public facts of hands and of understanding the world, to the novel, yet directed by subjective aim, public fact of my hand used as a symbol of my intentions of touching, connecting, understanding and longing. Public facts are coordinates within events.

Obviously the actual coordinations from casual efficacy and the extensive continuum amid the complexities of individuals minds can never be traced. Yet that many of us can agree that Rembrandt's The Jewish Bride (shown at right) symbolizes a superject of “grownup love,” or recognize that my outreaching hand can perform as a symbol of the attempt to understand, attests to the public’s flexibility and power to cross-classify prehensions of the actual or imagined world and to agree on public meanings.

Read more on this topic in the collage pages Lincoln #1 and Lincoln #2.