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"Reversions are the conceptions which arise by reason of the lure of contrast, as a condition for intensity of experience" (Whitehead, Process and Reality 277).

This website is a collection of philosophical reflections, art criticism, and cultural analyses, for which the above quote is an exemplary guide. Experience grows in sensitivity and increases in intensity by building atop incompatibilities—not through their resolution but through the feeling of something new. Whitehead calls this a contrast, which serves as another point of departure. This is what strikes me in theory and what moves me in art.

Contrast is the felt tension between incompatible components of the world felt in the becoming of experience. It poses a decision: whether to opt for some feelings over others and thus obviate the contrast through complete exclusion, or to achieve a harmony on the basis of the contrast and thereby increase the intensity of feeling. For instance, the resolution of sensory data into objects of which we are conscious is due to the contrast between the many component data and the forms they have in common. The parts do not dissolve into the whole, subsumed by the forms. There is no whole, only a new feeling of the contrast between them.¹

Being posed for decision, a contrast is a lure. To speak of a lure of contrast is Whitehead's way of expressing that the causal efficacy of past occasions is a real potentiality. "Real" because it is precisely what has already become, nothing more nor less; "potentiality" because, having perished, it "is" only insofar as it is potential for future becoming. The past has sway over its future, but it depends on its future to imbue what it the past transmits with the vivid immediacy of a novel occasion. ("Novelty" for Whitehead's process metaphysics is banal and not to be conflated with originality.) This means taking up an aim inherited from the world and experiencing the world anew in a manner that attempts, yet always fails, at a unified experience in full realization of that aim. Feeling contrasts between transmitted data is a step in that process of unification. The prehended data impose their way of feeling the world. Contrasts introduce an interval of mentality whereby experience may garner alternate perspectives, different forms, and even a novel aim to propose as a superject "in," so to speak, the consequent future.

The more commonly referenced phrase, and the one more frequently used by Whitehead, is “lure for feeling.” Propositions are lures for feeling because they are suggestive, inspiring a whole swath of affects: abjection, horror, joy, curiosity, verve, hope, and despair. Lure of contrast is a little more specific. It is a kind of feeling, namely one that provides the means for achieving "higher grades of actuality." Complexity in experience, with its width of sensitivity and its depth of intensity, is achieved by converting the disagreement of incoherence into the harmony of contrast.

But contrast is insufficient for a gain in intensity, and this is why it is figured as a lure: it provides the basis for process to proceed further with the synthesis of its world. Forms of feeling not directly present in the data under contrast are needed in order to feel the contrast itself.

Reversion is Whitehead’s first proposal to explain how experience is furnished with ideas not directly derivative from the world.² I have seen only so many shades of blue, yet I can imagine the absent shade that would appear to fit between those I know. Some of what has been decided by the past, and which necessarily conditions the creation of consequent experience, may be reverted to a wider range of possible feeling. Reversion is the moment of process whereby some datum that composes the real potentiality of the world becomes a bit closer to the pure potentiality of the form ingressed in it.