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Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology
One of the major philosophical texts of the 20th century, Process and Reality is based on Alfred North Whitehead’s influential lectures that he delivered at the University of Edinburgh in the 1920s on process philosophy.
Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant.
The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds.
Whitehead’s master work in philsophy, Process and Reality propounds a system of speculative philosophy, known as process philosophy, in which the various elements of reality into a consistent relation to each other. It is also an exploration of some of the preeminent thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as Descartes, Newton, Locke, and Kant.
The ultimate edition of Whitehead’s magnum opus, Process and Reality is a standard reference for scholars of all backgrounds.
413 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1929
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6422 people want to read
About the author
Alfred North Whitehead
101 books426 followersAlfred North Whitehead, OM FRS (15 February 1861 – 30 December 1947) was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which he co-wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality was fundamentally constructed by events rather than substances, and that these events cannot be defined apart from their relations to other events, thus rejecting the theory of independently existing substances. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb, Jr.
Isabelle Stengers wrote that "Whiteheadians are recruited among both philosophers and theologians, and the palette has been enriched by practitioners from the most diverse horizons, from ecology to feminism, practices that unite political struggle and spirituality with the sciences of education." Indeed, in recent decades attention to Whitehead's work has become more widespread, with interest extending to intellectuals in Europe and China, and coming from such diverse fields as ecology, physics, biology, education, economics, and psychology. However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Whitehead's thought drew much attention outside of a small group of American philosophers and theologians, and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles.
In recent years, Whiteheadian thought has become a stimulating influence in scientific research.
In physics particularly, Whitehead's thought has been influential, articulating a rival doctrine to Albert Einstein's general relativity. Whitehead's theory of gravitation continues to be controversial. Even Yutaka Tanaka, who suggests that the gravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, admits that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to quantum theory, his metaphysics of events has proved attractive to physicists in that field. Henry Stapp and David Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.
Whitehead is widely known for his influence in education theory. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titled Process Papers on process philosophy and education from 1996 to 2008. Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.
In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica (1910–13), which he co-wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy. Whitehead argued that reality was fundamentally constructed by events rather than substances, and that these events cannot be defined apart from their relations to other events, thus rejecting the theory of independently existing substances. Today Whitehead's philosophical works – particularly Process and Reality – are regarded as the foundational texts of process philosophy.
Whitehead's process philosophy argues that "there is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have consequences for the world around us." For this reason, one of the most promising applications of Whitehead's thought in recent years has been in the area of ecological civilization and environmental ethics pioneered by John B. Cobb, Jr.
Isabelle Stengers wrote that "Whiteheadians are recruited among both philosophers and theologians, and the palette has been enriched by practitioners from the most diverse horizons, from ecology to feminism, practices that unite political struggle and spirituality with the sciences of education." Indeed, in recent decades attention to Whitehead's work has become more widespread, with interest extending to intellectuals in Europe and China, and coming from such diverse fields as ecology, physics, biology, education, economics, and psychology. However, it was not until the 1970s and 1980s that Whitehead's thought drew much attention outside of a small group of American philosophers and theologians, and even today he is not considered especially influential outside of relatively specialized circles.
In recent years, Whiteheadian thought has become a stimulating influence in scientific research.
In physics particularly, Whitehead's thought has been influential, articulating a rival doctrine to Albert Einstein's general relativity. Whitehead's theory of gravitation continues to be controversial. Even Yutaka Tanaka, who suggests that the gravitational constant disagrees with experimental findings, admits that Einstein's work does not actually refute Whitehead's formulation. Also, although Whitehead himself gave only secondary consideration to quantum theory, his metaphysics of events has proved attractive to physicists in that field. Henry Stapp and David Bohm are among those whose work has been influenced by Whitehead.
Whitehead is widely known for his influence in education theory. His philosophy inspired the formation of the Association for Process Philosophy of Education (APPE), which published eleven volumes of a journal titled Process Papers on process philosophy and education from 1996 to 2008. Whitehead's theories on education also led to the formation of new modes of learning and new models of teaching.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 66 reviews
September 23, 2008
your mom is an eternal object.
November 4, 2013
Process and Reality is something else. The scope and ambition of this text is mindblowing as Whitehead is basically attempting to sum up all of existence and experience in just 351 pages and he comes pretty close to succeeding. It is difficult for me to fully grasp this book's initial impact and how revelatory it must have felt eighty years ago because now, the notion of everything being in a process of becoming instead of being static and fixed seems self-evident to me and I'd imagine most of my peers would say the same regardless of their familiarity with process thought. But I don't mean to disparage the book by saying this as regardless of the self-evidence of process thought - at least from my vantage point - this book is still significant as no philosopher had fully explicated such notions before. An awe-inspiring work.
However, if you are intending to read this book, you should know that this is easily the most difficult book I have ever read from beginning to end in my life. I'd recommend reading an introductory text or two on Whitehead or process theology before embarking on this so you can kind of read the system's essentials into the text. I'd recommend C. Robert Mesle's intro to Whitehead's metaphysics and if possible, to read this with people in a seminar type setting. This is not for the faint of heart.
However, if you are intending to read this book, you should know that this is easily the most difficult book I have ever read from beginning to end in my life. I'd recommend reading an introductory text or two on Whitehead or process theology before embarking on this so you can kind of read the system's essentials into the text. I'd recommend C. Robert Mesle's intro to Whitehead's metaphysics and if possible, to read this with people in a seminar type setting. This is not for the faint of heart.
September 19, 2024
Reading "Process and Reality" For The First Time
I have wanted to read Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality" since my undergraduate days as a philosophy major but have only done so recently, several years into retirement. It would have been an extraordinarily difficult book then and remains so now, with many years of living and reading in between. Still, there is some benefit to age. Whitehead (1861 -- 1947) was co-author with his student, Bertrand Russell of the famous work on logic, "Principia Mathematica" (1910 -- 1913), but he broadened his philosophical interests slowly. He became Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1924 at age 63 and published "Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology" in 1929 at the age of 68. It is a daunting work, both in the writing and in the reading.
Books find their readers, and it is unlikely that anyone without a strong interest in philosophical questions will pick up or stay with "Process and Reality". The book is slow, difficult, and convoluted, probably deliberately so, both in what it says and in the manner of presentation. The book includes passages of clear, eloquent writing. On the whole, it gives a feeling of near-impenetrability in its detail, organization, and not least, in its invention of new words. Still William James, one of the philosophical heroes of the book, said that the heart of any philosophy could be summarized on the back of a postage stamp. For Whitehead, the back of the stamp might read "Reject substance, fact-based philosophy in favor of a philosophy of breadth, continued process and change".
I am unable to summarize this book but will offer instead some of what I took from it. The basis, as stated above, is the rejection of philosophical thinking in terms of substance.
1. Whitehead practices systematic metaphysics and philosophy of the broadest generality in contrast to the focus on particular issues, often scientifically based, that prevailed during the 20th Century.
2 Whitehead stresses that philosophy is experientially based and descriptive in a broad sense. More importantly, he emphasizes the universality of feeling over reason. The book tries to show the breadth of feeling in experience without resorting to the anti-intellectualism of some of his philosophical contemporaries and successors.
3. Whitehead is more interested in how things become and change rather than in static concepts of things and of being.
4. Whitehead tries to show the interconnectedness as opposed to separateness between a. things, regardless of how disparate they might appear at first blush, b. different times and eras, and c. mind and body.
5. Whitehead calls his thinking the "philosophy of organism". The philosophy has living things as a loose model rather than static, unfeeling objects. His understanding of change in organisms makes use of what philosophers have called both efficient and final causes.
6. Whitehead emphasizes the importance of fallibility, chance, novelty, and error in trying to work to increase one's understanding.
7. Whitehead's philosophy has an inherently theistic component which does not appear to fit with traditional understandings of religion. The discussion of God that appears most fully in the final section of "Process and Reality" has inspired a theological school known as "Process Theology".
In the important "Preface" to this lengthy book, Whitehead offers his own nine-point summary of the prevalent habits of philosophical thought his work tries to displace. (p. xiii) He also teaches the "doctrine that the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute stubborn fact." In the opening chapter of the book, titled "Speculative Philosophy", Whitehead writes in explaining the nature both of speculative thought and of his own thinking:
"After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilized language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilization as logical premises. In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious."
At the outset of Part II of the book, called "Discussions and Applications", Whitehead offers his famous dictum that "the safest generalization of the European philosophical tradition is that it constitutes a series of footnotes to Plato." He proceeds to characterize his own thought as "Platonic" in a broad sense and then goes on to elaborate: "If we had to render Plato's general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or 'participation') of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence."
The book is arranged in five large parts which begin with the nature of speculative philosophy and proceeds with a lengthy treatment of the history of philosophy and science with an emphasis on Locke and Hume. The third and fourth parts develop Whitehead's understanding of feelings and of extensions in great, difficult detail, while the final part of the book, "Final Interpretation" explores an understanding of God that has been present uneasily in everything in the book that proceeds. In this book, one part does not build on another. Rather the book has a concentric, spiral form in which the same philosophical thinking is stated and expounded from different points of entry. Occasional summaries and relatively clear expressions punctuate throughout the obscurity of the writing.
"Process and Reality" requires a great deal of patience and a willingness to spend time with material that is nothing if not frustrating. For all the fog of the book, a philosophical approach comes through which is worth knowing and thinking about. It is a book I might well have read when younger, with the broad ambitions of youth. It remains, I think, a major work of 20th Century philosophy worthy to be considered and compared with more widely-read but difficult books such as Heidegger's "Being and Time" and Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations".
Robin Friedman
I have wanted to read Alfred North Whitehead's "Process and Reality" since my undergraduate days as a philosophy major but have only done so recently, several years into retirement. It would have been an extraordinarily difficult book then and remains so now, with many years of living and reading in between. Still, there is some benefit to age. Whitehead (1861 -- 1947) was co-author with his student, Bertrand Russell of the famous work on logic, "Principia Mathematica" (1910 -- 1913), but he broadened his philosophical interests slowly. He became Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1924 at age 63 and published "Process and Reality: an Essay in Cosmology" in 1929 at the age of 68. It is a daunting work, both in the writing and in the reading.
Books find their readers, and it is unlikely that anyone without a strong interest in philosophical questions will pick up or stay with "Process and Reality". The book is slow, difficult, and convoluted, probably deliberately so, both in what it says and in the manner of presentation. The book includes passages of clear, eloquent writing. On the whole, it gives a feeling of near-impenetrability in its detail, organization, and not least, in its invention of new words. Still William James, one of the philosophical heroes of the book, said that the heart of any philosophy could be summarized on the back of a postage stamp. For Whitehead, the back of the stamp might read "Reject substance, fact-based philosophy in favor of a philosophy of breadth, continued process and change".
I am unable to summarize this book but will offer instead some of what I took from it. The basis, as stated above, is the rejection of philosophical thinking in terms of substance.
1. Whitehead practices systematic metaphysics and philosophy of the broadest generality in contrast to the focus on particular issues, often scientifically based, that prevailed during the 20th Century.
2 Whitehead stresses that philosophy is experientially based and descriptive in a broad sense. More importantly, he emphasizes the universality of feeling over reason. The book tries to show the breadth of feeling in experience without resorting to the anti-intellectualism of some of his philosophical contemporaries and successors.
3. Whitehead is more interested in how things become and change rather than in static concepts of things and of being.
4. Whitehead tries to show the interconnectedness as opposed to separateness between a. things, regardless of how disparate they might appear at first blush, b. different times and eras, and c. mind and body.
5. Whitehead calls his thinking the "philosophy of organism". The philosophy has living things as a loose model rather than static, unfeeling objects. His understanding of change in organisms makes use of what philosophers have called both efficient and final causes.
6. Whitehead emphasizes the importance of fallibility, chance, novelty, and error in trying to work to increase one's understanding.
7. Whitehead's philosophy has an inherently theistic component which does not appear to fit with traditional understandings of religion. The discussion of God that appears most fully in the final section of "Process and Reality" has inspired a theological school known as "Process Theology".
In the important "Preface" to this lengthy book, Whitehead offers his own nine-point summary of the prevalent habits of philosophical thought his work tries to displace. (p. xiii) He also teaches the "doctrine that the creative advance of the world is the becoming, the perishing, and the objective immortalities of those things which jointly constitute stubborn fact." In the opening chapter of the book, titled "Speculative Philosophy", Whitehead writes in explaining the nature both of speculative thought and of his own thinking:
"After the initial basis of a rational life, with a civilized language, has been laid, all productive thought has proceeded either by the poetic insight of artists, or by the imaginative elaboration of schemes of thought capable of utilization as logical premises. In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious."
At the outset of Part II of the book, called "Discussions and Applications", Whitehead offers his famous dictum that "the safest generalization of the European philosophical tradition is that it constitutes a series of footnotes to Plato." He proceeds to characterize his own thought as "Platonic" in a broad sense and then goes on to elaborate: "If we had to render Plato's general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or 'participation') of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence."
The book is arranged in five large parts which begin with the nature of speculative philosophy and proceeds with a lengthy treatment of the history of philosophy and science with an emphasis on Locke and Hume. The third and fourth parts develop Whitehead's understanding of feelings and of extensions in great, difficult detail, while the final part of the book, "Final Interpretation" explores an understanding of God that has been present uneasily in everything in the book that proceeds. In this book, one part does not build on another. Rather the book has a concentric, spiral form in which the same philosophical thinking is stated and expounded from different points of entry. Occasional summaries and relatively clear expressions punctuate throughout the obscurity of the writing.
"Process and Reality" requires a great deal of patience and a willingness to spend time with material that is nothing if not frustrating. For all the fog of the book, a philosophical approach comes through which is worth knowing and thinking about. It is a book I might well have read when younger, with the broad ambitions of youth. It remains, I think, a major work of 20th Century philosophy worthy to be considered and compared with more widely-read but difficult books such as Heidegger's "Being and Time" and Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations".
Robin Friedman
September 21, 2017
They grew weary when I took to explaining why I'd skip the beach this year: "The truth is nothing personal, but that I do not like the beach. I abhor swimming, sand, people, and seagull excrete equally."
They then tried to persuade me with a cooler of ice cold Hoegaarden beer, not knowing I was going on a year without smoking or drinking: "Yes, I quit both simultaneously and yes, I know that is insane to think about. If you think the thought is painful, contemplate the life; having thus contemplated, you see how this says everything about you and nothing about me."
Then they tried flesh unlimited: "Verily, verily I say unto thee: I have undergone a Chrysostom of the mind."
I then vaulted a turnstile and leapt into the Q train. I handcuffed myself to the pole. I took out the key and unlocked the handcuffs and told everyone I was a performance artist. They gave me money. I took it to Peter Luger's steakhouse to finish Process and Reality for the first time.
Mind expansion through drug intake is pedestrian goyim nonsense compared to Whitehead edited by Griffin, 9/11's subterranean Grand Inquisitor. Fuck the beach and the sun, give me Process and Reality.
They then tried to persuade me with a cooler of ice cold Hoegaarden beer, not knowing I was going on a year without smoking or drinking: "Yes, I quit both simultaneously and yes, I know that is insane to think about. If you think the thought is painful, contemplate the life; having thus contemplated, you see how this says everything about you and nothing about me."
Then they tried flesh unlimited: "Verily, verily I say unto thee: I have undergone a Chrysostom of the mind."
I then vaulted a turnstile and leapt into the Q train. I handcuffed myself to the pole. I took out the key and unlocked the handcuffs and told everyone I was a performance artist. They gave me money. I took it to Peter Luger's steakhouse to finish Process and Reality for the first time.
Mind expansion through drug intake is pedestrian goyim nonsense compared to Whitehead edited by Griffin, 9/11's subterranean Grand Inquisitor. Fuck the beach and the sun, give me Process and Reality.
July 3, 2012
Truly remarkable. Although almost inaccessible to the layman, this seminal work in metaphysics is nonetheless one giant leap forward for human thought. In it, Whitehead elaborates the true work of metaphysics, namely the activity of building a conceptual system that links together the particular systems of the particular sciences and humanities into one coherent and logical framework. Metaphysics is not reductionism, but "descriptive generalization." He then spends the rest of the text laying out his own attempt at a metaphysical picture of the world. Grounded in relativity theory and quantum physics, Whitehead describes in detail how a view of reality as a series of processes and relationships, as opposed to things and "material stuff," is a far more accurate and useful description of our experience. Although not every detail is convincing, his overall picture of the world is remarkable in its power and scope. Wonderful work. I look forward now to some of his more accessible texts.
October 16, 2014
I've been told many times that I should look at Whitehead, but I have always been put off by his writing, which is decidedly not "analytic" even though he is an important figure in analytic philosophy (the co-author of Principia for Christ's sake!)
It turns out that I had a lot in common with Whitehead without knowing it: actual discrete events, potentials and forces are, for me, the fundamentals of a truly "physicalist" view of reality, the underlying basis of an extended world of matter and motion described by physics, and it appears something similar is true for him.
The downright weirdness of this book cannot be denied but there are also familiar reference points in Aristotle, Plato, Locke and Leibniz (esp. L's view that actuality is discrete, perspectival and atomistic and the continuum has only a potential existence, for which see the excellent Yale Leibniz volume The Labyrinth of the Continuum). I can't quite see what role the Platonic forms play in all this, except as patterns realized in the phenomena of force and relational interplay of forces, but, like the continuum, they seem banished away to the world of potentialities.
The material on extension is the most valuable stuff for me, where he seeks to get real metaphysical and scientific mileage out of his ideas of force and power. The ideas about a sort of material Spinozist "God" are the least interesting and useful and should have been left out in my opinion. Just seeing the "G word" makes me want to cringe. Also the vocabulary of feelings, subjectivity, community, organism, and all of that dreck puts a psychological-sociological spin on what is really a sophisticated physicalist theory of events. Whitehead's attempt to frame a "theory of everything" or being is, inevitably, so general as to be a "theory of nothing".
In short, Whitehead phrases things in his own peculiar way, and pens many, many nutty sentences, but the underlying coherence is there. This is not a word salad, but an attempt to express in a bizarre way some very deep ideas, which could be reformulated and deployed in contemporary philosophy of science.
It turns out that I had a lot in common with Whitehead without knowing it: actual discrete events, potentials and forces are, for me, the fundamentals of a truly "physicalist" view of reality, the underlying basis of an extended world of matter and motion described by physics, and it appears something similar is true for him.
The downright weirdness of this book cannot be denied but there are also familiar reference points in Aristotle, Plato, Locke and Leibniz (esp. L's view that actuality is discrete, perspectival and atomistic and the continuum has only a potential existence, for which see the excellent Yale Leibniz volume The Labyrinth of the Continuum). I can't quite see what role the Platonic forms play in all this, except as patterns realized in the phenomena of force and relational interplay of forces, but, like the continuum, they seem banished away to the world of potentialities.
The material on extension is the most valuable stuff for me, where he seeks to get real metaphysical and scientific mileage out of his ideas of force and power. The ideas about a sort of material Spinozist "God" are the least interesting and useful and should have been left out in my opinion. Just seeing the "G word" makes me want to cringe. Also the vocabulary of feelings, subjectivity, community, organism, and all of that dreck puts a psychological-sociological spin on what is really a sophisticated physicalist theory of events. Whitehead's attempt to frame a "theory of everything" or being is, inevitably, so general as to be a "theory of nothing".
In short, Whitehead phrases things in his own peculiar way, and pens many, many nutty sentences, but the underlying coherence is there. This is not a word salad, but an attempt to express in a bizarre way some very deep ideas, which could be reformulated and deployed in contemporary philosophy of science.
February 8, 2008
Not just a book--it's a hobby. There is so much to chew through in this book that it could take a LIFETIME to really understand it.
May 13, 2009
Kant is not the last word in Philosophy.
May 29, 2021
Whitehead’s reading of Spinoza is hilariously off the mark and shows the folly of reading him only through a Cartesian lens and not also through a Jewish one. Spinoza’s monism does not mean a staid world of illusionary change but the subordination of all that can exist to the totality of really existing substance and the ways in which it can become entangled to form multiple (and subordinate!) being. The monism of Spinoza makes possible for us the capacity to conceive and interpret real or actual objects within the world. In committing to the schizoid duality (what he, with no shortage of self-satisfaction, calls pluralism) of Christian theophilosophy Whitehead leaves his philosophy perilously poised for a breech birth and much in need of an inversion as Marx provided Hegel. In fact, Whitehead himself makes clear the relation of his own project to Hegel's Geist.
Spinoza’s monism is of direct importance for us as Marxists w/r/t to the base/superstructure concept: while base and superstructure are mutually inter-shaped what is possible in the superstructure is determined by what is really existing in the base. Israel as a theopolitical futurity is a transformation/transcendence to absolute immanence in contrast to (the kingdom) heaven as a theopolitical futurity of transcendence from the base (i.e.: that G-d exists primitively apart from man making his realisation through man such that a new base comes to replace an existing one, inarguably a form of idolatry and straight-up INSANE). Inevitably one comes to find fault with the formulation of process in Whitehead as it's nothing short of a recapitulation to the hegemonic ontological position of Christianity. That is to say, a choice made on insufficient ground such that what is possible as process is a runaway valorisation of said mode which is non-identical with the real OR waiting around for an act of celestial noblesse oblige. In more Deleuzian terms: the nomad war machine careening toward death or a waiting-unto-death. It’s just a matter of how fast you want to reach that dead end.
Spinoza’s monism is of direct importance for us as Marxists w/r/t to the base/superstructure concept: while base and superstructure are mutually inter-shaped what is possible in the superstructure is determined by what is really existing in the base. Israel as a theopolitical futurity is a transformation/transcendence to absolute immanence in contrast to (the kingdom) heaven as a theopolitical futurity of transcendence from the base (i.e.: that G-d exists primitively apart from man making his realisation through man such that a new base comes to replace an existing one, inarguably a form of idolatry and straight-up INSANE). Inevitably one comes to find fault with the formulation of process in Whitehead as it's nothing short of a recapitulation to the hegemonic ontological position of Christianity. That is to say, a choice made on insufficient ground such that what is possible as process is a runaway valorisation of said mode which is non-identical with the real OR waiting around for an act of celestial noblesse oblige. In more Deleuzian terms: the nomad war machine careening toward death or a waiting-unto-death. It’s just a matter of how fast you want to reach that dead end.
March 21, 2011
Whitehead did not figure prominently in my philosophical studies, but we did read process and reality in a class I took up at SUNY Binghamton. Dr. Stephen Ross was the professor, he is an incredibly rigorous and challenging thinker who has the particularly powerful gift of being nondoctrinaire in his approach to philosophy. As a result, he had no compunction in presenting Whitehead as a philosopher as challenging and important as Spinoza, Bergson, of Hegel. Whitehead's process philosophy is incredibly interesting, particularly since one of its strong implications is that we live in a multiverse with physical rules that are not the only possible rules for a given universe. From there, he spells out the implications of this thought for Philosohpy. Incredible.
September 30, 2019
I think I need to read this book again
April 5, 2021
Worth the read...
April 8, 2019
Dense but rewarding. I had read much in process thought prior to tackling this which helped. Sherburne’s “Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality” is indispensable as a companion for those without prior exposure.
Read
October 6, 2021Rewarding yet very difficult. Readers must learn to think ecologically and follow Whitehead to the conclusion that the essence of reality are events, in process and relation, and not enduring atomic substances.
Want to read
February 8, 2010Suggested by Ilya Prigogine as providing a way to emphasize relations over things
October 23, 2014
The most difficult book I've ever read, but also one of the most refreshing takes on metaphysics.
October 1, 2015
Excessive jargon made it unreadable in places, which is a shame, because those parts that are written clearly are very interesting, even beautiful at times.
May 8, 2015
July 28, 2012
Introduction
The scope and magnitude of Process and Reality is nearly incomprehensible in and of itself. The task of outlining metaphysical principles of Process and Reality is closer to the incomprehensible than the scope and magnitude, by the fact that Whitehead’s genius is exemplified by the onerous clarity and simplicity of the system. It seems as though every part is perfectly placed so as to reemphasize past propositional data to be remembered and reflected upon for consideration of a present endeavor. Nevertheless, the awesomeness of the task confronts one as both necessary and impossible. The following essay is meant as an introduction to the theory of concrescence, specifically focusing on the stages of concrescence, leaving out all but a few comments on those parts that are unnecessary for the metaphysical scheme: for instance, the societies of actual occasions. I will only use quotations or references in order to point the reader to useful expositions in Whitehead’s book. Otherwise, it is to be assumed that my sole source is Process and Reality.
A Few Preliminary Points
When I use the phrase immediacy of an actual occasion I am talking about the actual occasion or actual entity that has not reached satisfaction but is either (a) premature as to its synthesis of feelings, (b) premature as to its comparisons and contrasts of forms of definiteness, or (c) simply has not yet been characterized by “satisfaction”, completing concrescence and thereby perpetuated by its essence as an object or superject. Although this is how I will use the phrase immediacy of an actual occasion, there is a certain sense in which the immediacy of an actual occasion, the subject of an actual occasion, cannot be separated from the actual occasion it determines. This is in fact the principle of process: that every being is constituted by its becoming. But this consideration is taken in conjunction with the fact that although actual occasions are atomistic, they are also indefinitely devisable by the breakdown of prehensions. Although one may substitute the phrase subject of prehensions with immediacy of an actual occasion, I will use the phrase immediacy of an actual occasion for its connotations that are reminiscent of the atomistic property of actual occasions: the concrescent subject is always at work within the actual occasion that is divided into parts.
For practical purposes actual occasions and actual entities are substitutionary by denotation. I will usually use them in such a way. However, because the connotation of the actual occasion is that it is characterized by temporality, God is not considered an actual occasion, and when actual occasion is used then temporality is to be considered as one characteristic among others. Subsequently it is important to keep in mind that any form of distinction made within an actual entity is purely intellectual: it is not what is the case but it is what can be the case, as any actual entity is divisible into its feelings.
The Basic Outline of the Concrescence of an Actual Occasion
Actual occasions, or actual entities, are the only things that populate actuality. To inquire about the basic structures of actuality is to examine actual occasions as subjects of prehension. The terms here are used with extreme care. Actuality is not reality. Reality, literally the realm of the real, is that which is constitutive of an actual occasion—it is that which persuades or influences an actual occasion to make a decision about it. This is to say that the real must be constitutive of an actual occasion, but it does not mean that the real is the actual occasion. The very essence of an entity is that it is constitutive of an actual occasion. Actuality, the realm of the actual, is the realm of the realized, the realm that gives reality its actual form. Or, in other words, it gives specific actual constitution to a real factor.
But definition is the soul of actuality: the attainment of a peculiar definiteness is the final cause which animates a particular process; and its attainment halts its process, so that by transcendence it passes into its objective immortality as a new objective condition added to the riches of definiteness attainable, the ‘real potentiality’ of the universe.
A real factor in and of itself has no form of definiteness as to its realization in the present. In and of itself a real factor is a form of definiteness that is able influence the prehending subject to actualize it. A real factor only hints at a form of definiteness by virtue of its universality. A real factor, for Whitehead, is term an eternal object. This hinting can be shown by a brief example. If one thinks of a color, say red, then one, thinking of red in and of itself, does not see anything actual. In other words, red, in and of itself, as a universal characteristic, or a characteristic that is able to give a form of definiteness to an actual occasion, just tells us what an actual entity can look like. If I picture a stone, something actual, I can easily imagine it being red, despite the fact that it has another form of definiteness like grey or light brown, depending where you are.
When an eternal object is included as a form of definiteness, either by adversion or aversion by the prehending subject, then the eternal object is prehended; that is to say, the eternal object is taken into consideration by a prehending subject so as to influence the prehending subject in its self-constitution. This prehension is also called feeling.
There are other real factors in the prehending subject. To be a real factor here simply means to be part of the constitution of an actual entity. Universal real factors, giving a form of definiteness without reference to actuality, are called eternal objects. Actual occasions of the past are also real factors. All actual occasions of the past are called the actual world. Now the grounds for an account on the concrescence of a subject of prehension can be given.
Togetherness is the meaning of the term feeling that will from this point forward be referred to in at least one of its three forms: (1) physical prehension, which is the grasping of or taking into account any number of actual occasions for the integration into the self constitution of an actual entity; (2) conceptual prehensions, which is the grasping of or taking into account any number of eternal objects from the actual entities that were prehended in the physical prehension (for lower grades of actual occasions), or from the reversion of a form of definiteness common among actual entities that populate an actual world (in the unauthentic feeling of higher grades of occasion); (3) transmuted feeling, which is the objectification of a nexus of actual occasions. There will be an exposition of the higher grades of occasions later.
The Beginning of Concrescence as the Physical Prehension
Actual occasions begin with the objectification of the actual world. Of course, the actual world is meaningful only in respect to the actual occasion in question: the actual world is relative to where one is at, for instance. Thus, the actual world for the immediacy of an actual occasion is to be ascertained as those relevant potentialities for becoming that are given over by the actual occasions that populate an actual world. But for a potentiality to be taken into account there must be some relevance of definiteness that is given over by the actual world for the concrescence of the subject of prehension. The aim of a subject of prehension is called its subjective aim. But the subjective aim does not arise, formally, until the phase of conceptual prehension. So what determines the relevancy of objects that are not to be thought about in terms of their relevancy to the aim of the subject?
This is an interesting idea as it begs the question about the togetherness of entities, as togetherness is the meaning of relevancy. What constitutes the togetherness of any actual entity with any other actual entity is the common form of definiteness that defines them both. This is to say that the actual world gives over eternal objects, or forms of definiteness, that constitute the origination of the initial aim. The initial aim is the appetition for satisfaction based on the relevant forms of definiteness of any actual entity in the actual world of the immediacy of an actual occasion. This idea begs for explication.
The appetition of a subject of prehension is simply its desire or urge to become something. This appetition is aimed at a specific form of definiteness termed satisfaction. Here a few remarks will be useful as to the possibility of appetition.
The Possibility of Togetherness and the Necessity of the Primordial Nature of God
Because Whitehead is doing an exposition, or in some form advocating, Platonic realism, he is really interested in explicating the idea of “giveness.” One thing Whitehead says is that “giveness” carries two connotations: (1) a ‘decision’ that differentiates between what-is-given so that it is not what-is-not-given and (2) a literal ‘cut-off’ between actuality and nothingness. This expresses the very meaning of an actual entity: that it derives from a ‘decision’ for it. In this sense, the actual entity comes into existence (this is merely an intellectual abstraction, really, an actual entity’s becoming and is-ness is one and the same, but according to Whitehead one can distinguish three stages of concrescence: physical prehension, conceptual prehension, and creative synthesis) from the “giveness” of actuality—it is constituted—initiated—by its physical prehension of God and the actual world. The following reason is one main reason that God is necessitated in Whitehead’s system: the ontological principle.
The ontological principle says that for every reason there is something actual. This simply means that whenever I search for a reason for something, I am searching for an actual occasion (entity): every thing that I say is real, has efficacy in the actual world, then I am looking for what actual entity it is part of. When one talks about decision, then there is implicitly in this concept the implication of potentiality: one can only make a choice or decision when there are alternatives. But, for alternatives, there must be relevant potentialities: but what is the meaning of relevance? To be relevant, one potentiality must have the characteristic of being efficacious in a situation. It must be able to go “together” with the situation—it is a plausible outcome, in other words. So there is a togetherness of potentialities. But why? According to the ontological principle, there must be ”giveness” in the universe (this implies decision, potentiality, and relevance). So where is this giveness located? When an actual entity establishes itself by way of satisfaction, it dies and becomes an object to be prehended in another actual occasion (this means that it will be efficacious in the next moment). But where is the actual entity if it is dead, if it is no longer actual? According to Whitehead, the only actual things of the universe are actual occasions. Thus arrives the concept of “objective immortality” and “the primordial nature of God.” These are not simply ad hoc arguments, though the charge is there. These are required by the principle of coherence (that every category that cannot be explained in itself requires another concept that is not simply an implication of the category in question but is a wholly other category that, by explicating the reason for something that is found in every experience, is required by the system and in one sense “picks up the slack” for the lack of adequacy for the category in question).
The actual entities that are satisfied are located in the consequential nature of God. There will be a fuller exposition of this idea later, but for now it will suffice to say that there is, too, a realm of potentialities: for those potentialities that are not relevant or efficacious in the present actual occasion must be somewhere, and for there to be novelty and progress in the world the forms of definiteness must not be located only in the actual world—this would be mere repetition. All potentialities are located in the primordial nature of God. Whitehead’s idea of God will be explained further later in the essay.
Social Setting and Further Physical Prehension
It must be remembered, and this cannot be stressed enough, that every actual entity is somewhere. To ask what constitutes the formal aspect of an actual entity is to ask where such an actual entity is. Other than the primordial aspect of God that gives meaning to togetherness in the universe, there is always a social setting, constituted by the prehensions of actual occasions, that qualifies the actual world for the immediacy of an actual occasion. The actual world is the actual occasions that have reached their satisfactions and have become objects of the initial data for other actual occasions. This is the explanation to the first prehension of an actual occasion. Essentially becoming is “the transformation of incoherence into coherence, and in each particular instance ceases with this attainment. It is the immediacy of the actual entity.” A simple physical prehension, this is constitutive of all the low grades of actual occasions, is the physical prehension of a single actual occasion. A more complex physical prehension, characteristic of the higher grades of actual occasions, is a physical prehension of a nexus of actual occasions.
A nexus (or nexūs, the plural form) of actual occasions is simply a togetherness among actual occasions derivative of the fact that they prehend each other. This prehension is either temporal or spatial. A temporal nexus of actual occasions is arranged serially, which is to say that the occasions exist as a nexus by the fact that they give over a form of definiteness by transmission from moment to moment, occasion to occasion. The spatial nexus is characterized by mutual immanence. This is to say that spatial nexūs have many actual occasions actualized at the same time spread over a definite area; there are no antecedent occasions that pass on a form of definiteness. The former nexus is called a society of actual occasions. Societies are defined by their pasts: they have forms of definiteness that are past from generation to generation. Although all societies are nexūs, not all nexūs are societies. Nexūs are not defined by their pasts specifically; they are defined by their relationship to other actual occasions.
Societies are their own reason; in other words, they are self-sustaining. Societies survive by passing a defining characteristic from generation to generation. This points to a genetic relationship among its members: they pass along defining forms of definiteness through objectification. They impose a likeness on one another. It is important to notice that the likeness imposed upon the members of a society is derived from the environment: or, in other words, the society itself. There is an idea of subordinate societies as well: societies within societies whereby the subordinate society requires the more general society. Although I will not articulate this idea more fully here, the idea is that “there is no society in isolation,” reminiscent of the idea that all actual occasion prehend one another.
Nexūs and the Problem of Order
Thus nexūs are associated with the problem of order. Order assumes more than givenness that is supplied by objective immortality. Order assumes a totality of givenness, one whereby that which constitutes the givenness of physical prehension (or the initial datum, otherwise called) is in fact a harmonized unity by the fact that it is a multiplicity of actual occasions that have prehended each other simply by being in the same locality. Whitehead gives for grounds of order: (1) “adaptation for the attainment of an end,” (2) the actual occasions that objectify a nexus is concerned, as its end, with “the gradations of intensity,” (3) the constituents of a nexus can enter the prehension as contrasts and not incompatibilities, meaning that they keep their identities by their subjective forms as harmonized: this is the meaning of the gradations of intensity, and (4) that intensity in the concrescence involves the satisfaction of the subject, meaning that any feeling cannot be abstracted from the subject feeling it. To say that there are gradations of intensity is another way of saying that there are gradations of importance. This is the restatement of the category of subjective unity: “the one subject is the final end which conditions each component feeling.” The data prehended comes by way of a presupposed social order (as what is prehended are actual entities in their relationships and actual entities that were once subjects with a subjective unity). This is the solution to the problem of order, as briefly summarized. Now I will give a deeper explanation of the problem.
Conceptual Prehensions and Order
As has already been mentioned, eternal objects are part of the prehending subject. The conceptual prehension, the second stage of concrescence, is the prehension of an eternal object from the actual entity physically felt, or forms of definiteness from the nexus physically felt. The subjective form of a conceptual prehension is the subjective aim of the subject of prehension. This is to say that now the subject of prehension has an “ideal of itself,” whereby it chooses for itself those forms of definiteness that will contribute to its self-constitution. This selection process is by adversion and aversion. When an eternal object is considered to be useful for the self-establishment of a subject of prehension, then the valuation will be an adversion. When it promotes chaos or disjunction, then it is an aversion.
Disorder arises when a form of definiteness is not intense or does not have a depth of satisfaction. Disorder is where all societies originate: societies make order out of disorder by creating a form of likeness to be passed genetically to its members. The idea of contrast becomes useful here. A contrast is “the opposite of incompatibility,” whereby actual occasions in their complexity are taken into consideration as complex objects whose feelings are based on more factors than the actual world from which they originate. This is the idea that feelings have a vector character: they are transmitted from object to subject. Feelings take something there and make it something here. Thus, contrasts in the conceptual pole of objects in the physical pole promote intensity by the fact that it promotes distinctions among candidates for realization by allowing the subject of prehension to (1) distinguish between complexities so as to limit incompatibilities, and (2) enhance the experience of the objectified world by virtue of recognizing separate entities in their identity.
What has been said so far is simply an outline of the lower forms of actual occasion as outline in Whitehead's metaphysics. I'd recommend this book to metaphysicians.
Introduction
The scope and magnitude of Process and Reality is nearly incomprehensible in and of itself. The task of outlining metaphysical principles of Process and Reality is closer to the incomprehensible than the scope and magnitude, by the fact that Whitehead’s genius is exemplified by the onerous clarity and simplicity of the system. It seems as though every part is perfectly placed so as to reemphasize past propositional data to be remembered and reflected upon for consideration of a present endeavor. Nevertheless, the awesomeness of the task confronts one as both necessary and impossible. The following essay is meant as an introduction to the theory of concrescence, specifically focusing on the stages of concrescence, leaving out all but a few comments on those parts that are unnecessary for the metaphysical scheme: for instance, the societies of actual occasions. I will only use quotations or references in order to point the reader to useful expositions in Whitehead’s book. Otherwise, it is to be assumed that my sole source is Process and Reality.
A Few Preliminary Points
When I use the phrase immediacy of an actual occasion I am talking about the actual occasion or actual entity that has not reached satisfaction but is either (a) premature as to its synthesis of feelings, (b) premature as to its comparisons and contrasts of forms of definiteness, or (c) simply has not yet been characterized by “satisfaction”, completing concrescence and thereby perpetuated by its essence as an object or superject. Although this is how I will use the phrase immediacy of an actual occasion, there is a certain sense in which the immediacy of an actual occasion, the subject of an actual occasion, cannot be separated from the actual occasion it determines. This is in fact the principle of process: that every being is constituted by its becoming. But this consideration is taken in conjunction with the fact that although actual occasions are atomistic, they are also indefinitely devisable by the breakdown of prehensions. Although one may substitute the phrase subject of prehensions with immediacy of an actual occasion, I will use the phrase immediacy of an actual occasion for its connotations that are reminiscent of the atomistic property of actual occasions: the concrescent subject is always at work within the actual occasion that is divided into parts.
For practical purposes actual occasions and actual entities are substitutionary by denotation. I will usually use them in such a way. However, because the connotation of the actual occasion is that it is characterized by temporality, God is not considered an actual occasion, and when actual occasion is used then temporality is to be considered as one characteristic among others. Subsequently it is important to keep in mind that any form of distinction made within an actual entity is purely intellectual: it is not what is the case but it is what can be the case, as any actual entity is divisible into its feelings.
The Basic Outline of the Concrescence of an Actual Occasion
Actual occasions, or actual entities, are the only things that populate actuality. To inquire about the basic structures of actuality is to examine actual occasions as subjects of prehension. The terms here are used with extreme care. Actuality is not reality. Reality, literally the realm of the real, is that which is constitutive of an actual occasion—it is that which persuades or influences an actual occasion to make a decision about it. This is to say that the real must be constitutive of an actual occasion, but it does not mean that the real is the actual occasion. The very essence of an entity is that it is constitutive of an actual occasion. Actuality, the realm of the actual, is the realm of the realized, the realm that gives reality its actual form. Or, in other words, it gives specific actual constitution to a real factor.
But definition is the soul of actuality: the attainment of a peculiar definiteness is the final cause which animates a particular process; and its attainment halts its process, so that by transcendence it passes into its objective immortality as a new objective condition added to the riches of definiteness attainable, the ‘real potentiality’ of the universe.
A real factor in and of itself has no form of definiteness as to its realization in the present. In and of itself a real factor is a form of definiteness that is able influence the prehending subject to actualize it. A real factor only hints at a form of definiteness by virtue of its universality. A real factor, for Whitehead, is term an eternal object. This hinting can be shown by a brief example. If one thinks of a color, say red, then one, thinking of red in and of itself, does not see anything actual. In other words, red, in and of itself, as a universal characteristic, or a characteristic that is able to give a form of definiteness to an actual occasion, just tells us what an actual entity can look like. If I picture a stone, something actual, I can easily imagine it being red, despite the fact that it has another form of definiteness like grey or light brown, depending where you are.
When an eternal object is included as a form of definiteness, either by adversion or aversion by the prehending subject, then the eternal object is prehended; that is to say, the eternal object is taken into consideration by a prehending subject so as to influence the prehending subject in its self-constitution. This prehension is also called feeling.
There are other real factors in the prehending subject. To be a real factor here simply means to be part of the constitution of an actual entity. Universal real factors, giving a form of definiteness without reference to actuality, are called eternal objects. Actual occasions of the past are also real factors. All actual occasions of the past are called the actual world. Now the grounds for an account on the concrescence of a subject of prehension can be given.
Togetherness is the meaning of the term feeling that will from this point forward be referred to in at least one of its three forms: (1) physical prehension, which is the grasping of or taking into account any number of actual occasions for the integration into the self constitution of an actual entity; (2) conceptual prehensions, which is the grasping of or taking into account any number of eternal objects from the actual entities that were prehended in the physical prehension (for lower grades of actual occasions), or from the reversion of a form of definiteness common among actual entities that populate an actual world (in the unauthentic feeling of higher grades of occasion); (3) transmuted feeling, which is the objectification of a nexus of actual occasions. There will be an exposition of the higher grades of occasions later.
The Beginning of Concrescence as the Physical Prehension
Actual occasions begin with the objectification of the actual world. Of course, the actual world is meaningful only in respect to the actual occasion in question: the actual world is relative to where one is at, for instance. Thus, the actual world for the immediacy of an actual occasion is to be ascertained as those relevant potentialities for becoming that are given over by the actual occasions that populate an actual world. But for a potentiality to be taken into account there must be some relevance of definiteness that is given over by the actual world for the concrescence of the subject of prehension. The aim of a subject of prehension is called its subjective aim. But the subjective aim does not arise, formally, until the phase of conceptual prehension. So what determines the relevancy of objects that are not to be thought about in terms of their relevancy to the aim of the subject?
This is an interesting idea as it begs the question about the togetherness of entities, as togetherness is the meaning of relevancy. What constitutes the togetherness of any actual entity with any other actual entity is the common form of definiteness that defines them both. This is to say that the actual world gives over eternal objects, or forms of definiteness, that constitute the origination of the initial aim. The initial aim is the appetition for satisfaction based on the relevant forms of definiteness of any actual entity in the actual world of the immediacy of an actual occasion. This idea begs for explication.
The appetition of a subject of prehension is simply its desire or urge to become something. This appetition is aimed at a specific form of definiteness termed satisfaction. Here a few remarks will be useful as to the possibility of appetition.
The Possibility of Togetherness and the Necessity of the Primordial Nature of God
Because Whitehead is doing an exposition, or in some form advocating, Platonic realism, he is really interested in explicating the idea of “giveness.” One thing Whitehead says is that “giveness” carries two connotations: (1) a ‘decision’ that differentiates between what-is-given so that it is not what-is-not-given and (2) a literal ‘cut-off’ between actuality and nothingness. This expresses the very meaning of an actual entity: that it derives from a ‘decision’ for it. In this sense, the actual entity comes into existence (this is merely an intellectual abstraction, really, an actual entity’s becoming and is-ness is one and the same, but according to Whitehead one can distinguish three stages of concrescence: physical prehension, conceptual prehension, and creative synthesis) from the “giveness” of actuality—it is constituted—initiated—by its physical prehension of God and the actual world. The following reason is one main reason that God is necessitated in Whitehead’s system: the ontological principle.
The ontological principle says that for every reason there is something actual. This simply means that whenever I search for a reason for something, I am searching for an actual occasion (entity): every thing that I say is real, has efficacy in the actual world, then I am looking for what actual entity it is part of. When one talks about decision, then there is implicitly in this concept the implication of potentiality: one can only make a choice or decision when there are alternatives. But, for alternatives, there must be relevant potentialities: but what is the meaning of relevance? To be relevant, one potentiality must have the characteristic of being efficacious in a situation. It must be able to go “together” with the situation—it is a plausible outcome, in other words. So there is a togetherness of potentialities. But why? According to the ontological principle, there must be ”giveness” in the universe (this implies decision, potentiality, and relevance). So where is this giveness located? When an actual entity establishes itself by way of satisfaction, it dies and becomes an object to be prehended in another actual occasion (this means that it will be efficacious in the next moment). But where is the actual entity if it is dead, if it is no longer actual? According to Whitehead, the only actual things of the universe are actual occasions. Thus arrives the concept of “objective immortality” and “the primordial nature of God.” These are not simply ad hoc arguments, though the charge is there. These are required by the principle of coherence (that every category that cannot be explained in itself requires another concept that is not simply an implication of the category in question but is a wholly other category that, by explicating the reason for something that is found in every experience, is required by the system and in one sense “picks up the slack” for the lack of adequacy for the category in question).
The actual entities that are satisfied are located in the consequential nature of God. There will be a fuller exposition of this idea later, but for now it will suffice to say that there is, too, a realm of potentialities: for those potentialities that are not relevant or efficacious in the present actual occasion must be somewhere, and for there to be novelty and progress in the world the forms of definiteness must not be located only in the actual world—this would be mere repetition. All potentialities are located in the primordial nature of God. Whitehead’s idea of God will be explained further later in the essay.
Social Setting and Further Physical Prehension
It must be remembered, and this cannot be stressed enough, that every actual entity is somewhere. To ask what constitutes the formal aspect of an actual entity is to ask where such an actual entity is. Other than the primordial aspect of God that gives meaning to togetherness in the universe, there is always a social setting, constituted by the prehensions of actual occasions, that qualifies the actual world for the immediacy of an actual occasion. The actual world is the actual occasions that have reached their satisfactions and have become objects of the initial data for other actual occasions. This is the explanation to the first prehension of an actual occasion. Essentially becoming is “the transformation of incoherence into coherence, and in each particular instance ceases with this attainment. It is the immediacy of the actual entity.” A simple physical prehension, this is constitutive of all the low grades of actual occasions, is the physical prehension of a single actual occasion. A more complex physical prehension, characteristic of the higher grades of actual occasions, is a physical prehension of a nexus of actual occasions.
A nexus (or nexūs, the plural form) of actual occasions is simply a togetherness among actual occasions derivative of the fact that they prehend each other. This prehension is either temporal or spatial. A temporal nexus of actual occasions is arranged serially, which is to say that the occasions exist as a nexus by the fact that they give over a form of definiteness by transmission from moment to moment, occasion to occasion. The spatial nexus is characterized by mutual immanence. This is to say that spatial nexūs have many actual occasions actualized at the same time spread over a definite area; there are no antecedent occasions that pass on a form of definiteness. The former nexus is called a society of actual occasions. Societies are defined by their pasts: they have forms of definiteness that are past from generation to generation. Although all societies are nexūs, not all nexūs are societies. Nexūs are not defined by their pasts specifically; they are defined by their relationship to other actual occasions.
Societies are their own reason; in other words, they are self-sustaining. Societies survive by passing a defining characteristic from generation to generation. This points to a genetic relationship among its members: they pass along defining forms of definiteness through objectification. They impose a likeness on one another. It is important to notice that the likeness imposed upon the members of a society is derived from the environment: or, in other words, the society itself. There is an idea of subordinate societies as well: societies within societies whereby the subordinate society requires the more general society. Although I will not articulate this idea more fully here, the idea is that “there is no society in isolation,” reminiscent of the idea that all actual occasion prehend one another.
Nexūs and the Problem of Order
Thus nexūs are associated with the problem of order. Order assumes more than givenness that is supplied by objective immortality. Order assumes a totality of givenness, one whereby that which constitutes the givenness of physical prehension (or the initial datum, otherwise called) is in fact a harmonized unity by the fact that it is a multiplicity of actual occasions that have prehended each other simply by being in the same locality. Whitehead gives for grounds of order: (1) “adaptation for the attainment of an end,” (2) the actual occasions that objectify a nexus is concerned, as its end, with “the gradations of intensity,” (3) the constituents of a nexus can enter the prehension as contrasts and not incompatibilities, meaning that they keep their identities by their subjective forms as harmonized: this is the meaning of the gradations of intensity, and (4) that intensity in the concrescence involves the satisfaction of the subject, meaning that any feeling cannot be abstracted from the subject feeling it. To say that there are gradations of intensity is another way of saying that there are gradations of importance. This is the restatement of the category of subjective unity: “the one subject is the final end which conditions each component feeling.” The data prehended comes by way of a presupposed social order (as what is prehended are actual entities in their relationships and actual entities that were once subjects with a subjective unity). This is the solution to the problem of order, as briefly summarized. Now I will give a deeper explanation of the problem.
Conceptual Prehensions and Order
As has already been mentioned, eternal objects are part of the prehending subject. The conceptual prehension, the second stage of concrescence, is the prehension of an eternal object from the actual entity physically felt, or forms of definiteness from the nexus physically felt. The subjective form of a conceptual prehension is the subjective aim of the subject of prehension. This is to say that now the subject of prehension has an “ideal of itself,” whereby it chooses for itself those forms of definiteness that will contribute to its self-constitution. This selection process is by adversion and aversion. When an eternal object is considered to be useful for the self-establishment of a subject of prehension, then the valuation will be an adversion. When it promotes chaos or disjunction, then it is an aversion.
Disorder arises when a form of definiteness is not intense or does not have a depth of satisfaction. Disorder is where all societies originate: societies make order out of disorder by creating a form of likeness to be passed genetically to its members. The idea of contrast becomes useful here. A contrast is “the opposite of incompatibility,” whereby actual occasions in their complexity are taken into consideration as complex objects whose feelings are based on more factors than the actual world from which they originate. This is the idea that feelings have a vector character: they are transmitted from object to subject. Feelings take something there and make it something here. Thus, contrasts in the conceptual pole of objects in the physical pole promote intensity by the fact that it promotes distinctions among candidates for realization by allowing the subject of prehension to (1) distinguish between complexities so as to limit incompatibilities, and (2) enhance the experience of the objectified world by virtue of recognizing separate entities in their identity.
What has been said so far is simply an outline of the lower forms of actual occasion as outline in Whitehead's metaphysics. I'd recommend this book to metaphysicians.
October 25, 2024
This book is very good. It is also very white and English, and as has been established, I don't love that.
I would not recommend this book to the faint of heart, or anyone without a background in philosophy. It is fiendishly difficult, probably the most difficult book I've ever read (eat your heart out, Ulysses). Whitehead has many intellectual virtues, but clear communication is not one of them. He's an academic through and through in that his prose is often blindingly opaque.
As speculative, systematic natural theology, this is incredibly navel gazey, but one cannot argue with it's thoroughness. While I think it is a little lifeless in its sanitary secularity, I think it provides a good exit path through secularism to mysticism, one not bound up in problematic appropriations. As Westerners, we need not appropriate indigenous spiritual practices for the pleasure of us, their former oppressors, to have a foundational, transcendent language of nature. Whitehead shows us what we can say, how all creation speaks.
I would forgive anyone for passing on this book, but for those willing to sift Whitehead's words, there's a chance you could find gold or God in its pages.
I would not recommend this book to the faint of heart, or anyone without a background in philosophy. It is fiendishly difficult, probably the most difficult book I've ever read (eat your heart out, Ulysses). Whitehead has many intellectual virtues, but clear communication is not one of them. He's an academic through and through in that his prose is often blindingly opaque.
As speculative, systematic natural theology, this is incredibly navel gazey, but one cannot argue with it's thoroughness. While I think it is a little lifeless in its sanitary secularity, I think it provides a good exit path through secularism to mysticism, one not bound up in problematic appropriations. As Westerners, we need not appropriate indigenous spiritual practices for the pleasure of us, their former oppressors, to have a foundational, transcendent language of nature. Whitehead shows us what we can say, how all creation speaks.
I would forgive anyone for passing on this book, but for those willing to sift Whitehead's words, there's a chance you could find gold or God in its pages.
October 12, 2020
Hefty! Read in tangent with online lectures by John Cobb through the Home-brewed Christianity podcast.
Read
August 27, 2024Will come back to this.
April 19, 2025
Book of the Day – Process And Reality
Today’s Book of the Day is Process and Reality, written by Alfred North Whitehead in 1929.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher whose intellectual trajectory traversed some of the most fertile grounds of Western thought. Initially recognised for his co-authorship with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, Whitehead transitioned into speculative metaphysics during his tenure at Harvard, where he produced a corpus of philosophical writings marked by profound originality and conceptual audacity.
I have chosen this book because of its metaphysical scope and because its vision of reality as fundamentally processual resonates deeply with the ontological intuitions of both Buddhist and Stoic thought. Whitehead’s cosmology offers a non-dualistic, anti-substantialist, non-materialist metaphysics capable of grounding ethical responsibility, cosmic interrelatedness, and the epistemic humility needed for a truly post-Cartesian, post-capitalist world. It is not merely a book but a cognitive crucible, within which thought is transfigured into a more subtle, holistic, and fluid mode of engagement with being.
Some consider Process and Reality a challenging book into which even seasoned metaphysicians may enter only to find themselves deeply engaged. And yet, for those willing to endure its density, its elliptical prose, and the absence of any simplified scaffolding, the reward is extraordinary: the revelation of a metaphysical system that is simultaneously coherent, elegant, and cosmically intimate.
This is not a manual of philosophical analysis, nor a manifesto of doctrinal clarity, but a living metaphysics. A cosmos in conceptual form, unfolding itself through categories, epochs, and creative advance.
Whitehead’s central departure from the Western metaphysical canon lies in his critique of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, the tendency of modern thought to reify abstractions such as space, time, matter, or identity as if they were ontologically primary rather than derived constructs. Against the backdrop of classical substance ontology, which sees the world as composed of enduring, isolated things, Whitehead substitutes an ontology of events, or “actual occasions”, each one a complex process of becoming, interrelated with the universe through what he calls prehensions.
Every occasion is a microcosmic integration of past influences and future possibilities, fusing into a momentary self-actualisation that perishes as soon as it becomes. In this vision, permanence is derivative of process, not vice versa—a radical inversion of the Platonic-Aristotelian inheritance.
At the heart of this system lies the concept of “concrescence”, a term Whitehead borrows and redefines as the self-unifying process through which an actual occasion integrates its inherited data into a novel subjective unity.
Each moment of experience is not merely a passive reception but a self-determining synthesis, animated by what Whitehead terms a “subjective aim”—an internal teleology guiding the occasion’s realisation of potentiality. This internal teleology is not imposed from without but arises from within the fabric of the cosmos itself, as each event strives to instantiate aesthetic intensity, harmony, and value. Here, metaphysics becomes deeply aesthetic, for Whitehead sees the universe as an adventure in value realisation—a “creative advance into novelty”.
One of the most astonishing dimensions of Whitehead’s metaphysical imagination is his reconception of God.
In contrast to the monotheistic, omnipotent deity of classical theism, Whitehead posits a dipolar God: one pole being primordial, eternal, and abstract (the realm of pure potentiality or “eternal objects”), and the other pole being consequent, temporal, and immanently related to the actual world. God, in this view, is not a creator ex nihilo but a participant in the cosmic process, luring occasions toward value, beauty, and harmony. Far from being the unmoved mover of Aristotle or the omniscient watchmaker of Deism, Whitehead’s God is a relational, persuasive, non-coercive presence, responsive to the unfolding of reality. God provides the initial aim for each occasion but does not dictate its outcome, thus leaving room for creativity, freedom, and genuine novelty.
This model of divinity offers a potential metaphysical bridge between Buddhist notions of a cosmos permeated by dependent origination and Stoic conceptions of logos as the rational principle governing nature. In Buddhist terms, one might interpret Whitehead’s God not as a personified entity but as the cosmic function of orientation toward awakening—the dynamic structure of karma and interdependence itself. In Stoic terms, the persuasive rather than deterministic nature of divine immanence echoes the idea that one must freely consent to nature’s rational order through the cultivation of virtue.
Thus, Whitehead’s theology is not a departure from spiritual realism but a profound reinvention of theism for an era that demands coherence with quantum indeterminacy, evolutionary contingency, and ethical subjectivity.
What makes Process and Reality particularly resonant for our time is its capacity to articulate a non-reductionist, non-dualist ontology that can accommodate both scientific rigour and existential meaning.
Whitehead integrates insights from Einsteinian relativity (regarding the relativity of simultaneity and the fluidity of time) with quantum notions of potentiality and actualisation, yielding a universe in which becoming is fundamental and entities are constituted by their relations. There are no isolated “things” in Whitehead’s cosmos; rather, each occasion is a nexus of relationships, a momentary actualisation of possibility rooted in a vast, interconnected web of past and future potentialities.
This is a metaphysics that validates both science and spirituality, without reducing one to the other.
Furthermore, Whitehead’s critique of mechanism and materialism is prophetic. Written at the height of the industrial age and the rise of capitalist exploitation of nature, Process and Reality presents an alternative ontology in which value is intrinsic to being, not something superimposed upon inert matter. In a capitalist culture that commodifies existence, flattens subjectivity, and instrumentalises relationships, Whitehead reminds us that reality is not a machine but an organism, and that the world is not made up of dead parts but of living wholes, each striving for significance.
In this way, his metaphysics holds profound ecological and ethical implications, demanding a relational rather than extractive approach to the planet, to society, and to the self.
Linguistically, the book is formidable. Whitehead’s syntax is excellently labyrinthine, his terminology sui generis, and his method cumulative rather than linear. The reading experience is less akin to ascending a staircase of propositions than to navigating a fractal landscape of interlocking insights. Each concept is recursively defined in terms of others; meaning emerges not through didactic exposition but through the gradual crystallisation of a conceptual world.
This demands of the reader not passive reception but active participation—a methodological parallel to the very ontology the book expounds.
Every sentence, no matter how challenging, bears the mark of extreme precision and deep responsibility to the metaphysical questions it seeks to answer. Unlike many modern philosophical systems that dissolve into linguistic games or scholastic formalism, Whitehead’s work retains a spiritual seriousness—a commitment to understanding the nature of reality in its fullest, richest, most interconnected form.
One does not read Process and Reality to master it, but to be transformed by it. To have one’s metaphysical intuitions recalibrated toward a cosmos that is alive, relational, and value-laden.
In conclusion, Process and Reality articulates a worldview in which creativity, relationality, and becoming are ontologically prior to substance, separation, and stasis.
It offers a radical alternative to both reductive materialism and dogmatic idealism, situating itself instead within a metaphysical middle path that is astonishingly consonant with the insights of Eastern wisdom traditions and the ethical demands of our ecological age.
To engage with this book is not merely to read philosophy—it is to undergo a metamorphosis in one’s very way of thinking, perceiving, and participating in the world. For those willing to enjoy some bits of complexity, Process and Reality reveals a universe that is at once mathematically elegant, aesthetically meaningful, ethically vibrant, and spiritually profound.
Today’s Book of the Day is Process and Reality, written by Alfred North Whitehead in 1929.
Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was a British mathematician, logician, and philosopher whose intellectual trajectory traversed some of the most fertile grounds of Western thought. Initially recognised for his co-authorship with Bertrand Russell of Principia Mathematica, Whitehead transitioned into speculative metaphysics during his tenure at Harvard, where he produced a corpus of philosophical writings marked by profound originality and conceptual audacity.
I have chosen this book because of its metaphysical scope and because its vision of reality as fundamentally processual resonates deeply with the ontological intuitions of both Buddhist and Stoic thought. Whitehead’s cosmology offers a non-dualistic, anti-substantialist, non-materialist metaphysics capable of grounding ethical responsibility, cosmic interrelatedness, and the epistemic humility needed for a truly post-Cartesian, post-capitalist world. It is not merely a book but a cognitive crucible, within which thought is transfigured into a more subtle, holistic, and fluid mode of engagement with being.
Some consider Process and Reality a challenging book into which even seasoned metaphysicians may enter only to find themselves deeply engaged. And yet, for those willing to endure its density, its elliptical prose, and the absence of any simplified scaffolding, the reward is extraordinary: the revelation of a metaphysical system that is simultaneously coherent, elegant, and cosmically intimate.
This is not a manual of philosophical analysis, nor a manifesto of doctrinal clarity, but a living metaphysics. A cosmos in conceptual form, unfolding itself through categories, epochs, and creative advance.
Whitehead’s central departure from the Western metaphysical canon lies in his critique of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”, the tendency of modern thought to reify abstractions such as space, time, matter, or identity as if they were ontologically primary rather than derived constructs. Against the backdrop of classical substance ontology, which sees the world as composed of enduring, isolated things, Whitehead substitutes an ontology of events, or “actual occasions”, each one a complex process of becoming, interrelated with the universe through what he calls prehensions.
Every occasion is a microcosmic integration of past influences and future possibilities, fusing into a momentary self-actualisation that perishes as soon as it becomes. In this vision, permanence is derivative of process, not vice versa—a radical inversion of the Platonic-Aristotelian inheritance.
At the heart of this system lies the concept of “concrescence”, a term Whitehead borrows and redefines as the self-unifying process through which an actual occasion integrates its inherited data into a novel subjective unity.
Each moment of experience is not merely a passive reception but a self-determining synthesis, animated by what Whitehead terms a “subjective aim”—an internal teleology guiding the occasion’s realisation of potentiality. This internal teleology is not imposed from without but arises from within the fabric of the cosmos itself, as each event strives to instantiate aesthetic intensity, harmony, and value. Here, metaphysics becomes deeply aesthetic, for Whitehead sees the universe as an adventure in value realisation—a “creative advance into novelty”.
One of the most astonishing dimensions of Whitehead’s metaphysical imagination is his reconception of God.
In contrast to the monotheistic, omnipotent deity of classical theism, Whitehead posits a dipolar God: one pole being primordial, eternal, and abstract (the realm of pure potentiality or “eternal objects”), and the other pole being consequent, temporal, and immanently related to the actual world. God, in this view, is not a creator ex nihilo but a participant in the cosmic process, luring occasions toward value, beauty, and harmony. Far from being the unmoved mover of Aristotle or the omniscient watchmaker of Deism, Whitehead’s God is a relational, persuasive, non-coercive presence, responsive to the unfolding of reality. God provides the initial aim for each occasion but does not dictate its outcome, thus leaving room for creativity, freedom, and genuine novelty.
This model of divinity offers a potential metaphysical bridge between Buddhist notions of a cosmos permeated by dependent origination and Stoic conceptions of logos as the rational principle governing nature. In Buddhist terms, one might interpret Whitehead’s God not as a personified entity but as the cosmic function of orientation toward awakening—the dynamic structure of karma and interdependence itself. In Stoic terms, the persuasive rather than deterministic nature of divine immanence echoes the idea that one must freely consent to nature’s rational order through the cultivation of virtue.
Thus, Whitehead’s theology is not a departure from spiritual realism but a profound reinvention of theism for an era that demands coherence with quantum indeterminacy, evolutionary contingency, and ethical subjectivity.
What makes Process and Reality particularly resonant for our time is its capacity to articulate a non-reductionist, non-dualist ontology that can accommodate both scientific rigour and existential meaning.
Whitehead integrates insights from Einsteinian relativity (regarding the relativity of simultaneity and the fluidity of time) with quantum notions of potentiality and actualisation, yielding a universe in which becoming is fundamental and entities are constituted by their relations. There are no isolated “things” in Whitehead’s cosmos; rather, each occasion is a nexus of relationships, a momentary actualisation of possibility rooted in a vast, interconnected web of past and future potentialities.
This is a metaphysics that validates both science and spirituality, without reducing one to the other.
Furthermore, Whitehead’s critique of mechanism and materialism is prophetic. Written at the height of the industrial age and the rise of capitalist exploitation of nature, Process and Reality presents an alternative ontology in which value is intrinsic to being, not something superimposed upon inert matter. In a capitalist culture that commodifies existence, flattens subjectivity, and instrumentalises relationships, Whitehead reminds us that reality is not a machine but an organism, and that the world is not made up of dead parts but of living wholes, each striving for significance.
In this way, his metaphysics holds profound ecological and ethical implications, demanding a relational rather than extractive approach to the planet, to society, and to the self.
Linguistically, the book is formidable. Whitehead’s syntax is excellently labyrinthine, his terminology sui generis, and his method cumulative rather than linear. The reading experience is less akin to ascending a staircase of propositions than to navigating a fractal landscape of interlocking insights. Each concept is recursively defined in terms of others; meaning emerges not through didactic exposition but through the gradual crystallisation of a conceptual world.
This demands of the reader not passive reception but active participation—a methodological parallel to the very ontology the book expounds.
Every sentence, no matter how challenging, bears the mark of extreme precision and deep responsibility to the metaphysical questions it seeks to answer. Unlike many modern philosophical systems that dissolve into linguistic games or scholastic formalism, Whitehead’s work retains a spiritual seriousness—a commitment to understanding the nature of reality in its fullest, richest, most interconnected form.
One does not read Process and Reality to master it, but to be transformed by it. To have one’s metaphysical intuitions recalibrated toward a cosmos that is alive, relational, and value-laden.
In conclusion, Process and Reality articulates a worldview in which creativity, relationality, and becoming are ontologically prior to substance, separation, and stasis.
It offers a radical alternative to both reductive materialism and dogmatic idealism, situating itself instead within a metaphysical middle path that is astonishingly consonant with the insights of Eastern wisdom traditions and the ethical demands of our ecological age.
To engage with this book is not merely to read philosophy—it is to undergo a metamorphosis in one’s very way of thinking, perceiving, and participating in the world. For those willing to enjoy some bits of complexity, Process and Reality reveals a universe that is at once mathematically elegant, aesthetically meaningful, ethically vibrant, and spiritually profound.
June 8, 2022
Most philosophies give you a one-sided view of reality, which is convincing until you absorb another equally convincing view of reality. This leads us into dichotomies of substance-quality, subject-object, existence-essence, permanence-flow and to philosophies that narrow the field of enquiry in order to simplify e.g the philosophy of language (language is inherently indeterminate until the precise context is known) or existentialism (which has nothing to say about the objective world) or the Kantian notion of "the objective world as a theoretical construct from purely subjective experience".
Whitehead is impressive because he seeks to incorporate all forms of experience into his philosophy o0f organism (experience drunk or sober, waking, and drowsy etc.) and yet, at the same time, maintain a scientific outlook on the world. He says his aim is to " construct a system of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science." He rejects the narrow sensationalist doctrine of perception and also basing scientific methods purely on Baconian induction, claiming that the true method of discovery also necessitates a flight of the creative imagination "controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic".
In doing so he builds a cosmology based on "actual entities" or "actual occurrences" ,drops of experience which flow into one another creating a never-ending process of experiences .In Whitehead's words , actual entities are "complex and interdependent" Each actual entity can be subdivided into a series of prehensions which are vectors taking in "emotion, and purpose, and valuation, and causation". We relate to one another through prehensions and our evaluation of them. All perception is embodied – our body is the yardstick of relatedness and relationships. The integration of feelings, past events, ideas and our subjective aim (pointing to the future) concresces into an actual entity which then fades away to be incorporated into other actual entities as "stubborn" facts. Each drop of experience takes in (prehends) the whole of our past and selects from a universe of eternal objects or potentialities (an extension of Platonic forms), abstractions, facts, propositions, groups of actual events called "societies", and "nexus" or relations between actual events. These prehensions are compared, contrasted, valuated sifted, and integrated by the subjective aim in a series of stages and it is only in the later stages of completion that we become conscious towards one complex integral feeling called a satisfaction. So many operations are performed subconsciously that Whitehead asserts "in general consciousness is negligible"
Each actual entity is a novel creative act in which the whole universe (the many) participates. Whitehead says " the many become one and are increased by one". We can see the actual world as a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. Every being (actual or non-actual) "is a potential for every becoming. But equally every becoming leads to a change in being (new actual entity). "The feeler is the unity emergent from its own feelings;" "An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject (object) of its experience. "There is both a physical pole and a mental pole to each actual entity. The physical pole enables the prehending of other actual activities while the mental pole enables the prehension of eternal objects. Experience is always an amalgam of conceptual thought and feeling., while the feeling tone of our subjective aim lures us on into the future.
Hume and Kant were mistaken in making presentational immediacy through the senses, the primary stage of experience with causal efficacy a secondary stage or inference. Whitehead claims that we learn causal efficacy through the "witness" of our body, when we are touched or touch (physically or mentally), we are moved in some way. Infants learn cause and effect through their bodies, exploring the world through feeling pleasure and pain, fear and joy in our bodies. For Whitehead causal efficacy is the primary function. He says "The more primitive types of experience are concerned with sense reception, and not with sense-perception."
The only absolute in Whitehead's philosophy is creativity which produces novelty, Novelty, however ,does not presuppose order, so God is introduced as the agent of creativity, who evaluates eternal objects, lures actual entities towards order, absorbing them within himself and participating in their joys and sorrow. Whitehead says "the universe is thus a creative advance into novelty."
For Whitehead, even an ordinary physical object is a society of actual occurrences, which endures through repeating its history or structure over time e.g chairs, rocks,clouds, crystals and molecules. Living organisms are also structured societies whose ability to achieve goal-seeking, consciousness and creativity becomes greater as we move up the scale from primitive organisms to man.
This is a book well worth reading but it needs to be read a number of times to be really understood. Whitehead's writing style is dense, he uses a lot of his own terminology and there are very few examples.
I recommend supplementing you reading with watching short introduction videos on Process Thought by Jay MacDaniel or longer lectures by Matthew Segall.
My only criticism of Whitehead's ideas is that his notion of God as a jack of all trades, playing a number of different roles is hardly credible.
Nevertheless, this book is far ahead of its time with its ideas of embodied notion and cognition Perhaps if Whitehead were alive today he would incorporate Jungian archetypes as an additional composite entity, and use Rupert Shaldrake's ideas of Morphic Resonance.
Whitehead is impressive because he seeks to incorporate all forms of experience into his philosophy o0f organism (experience drunk or sober, waking, and drowsy etc.) and yet, at the same time, maintain a scientific outlook on the world. He says his aim is to " construct a system of ideas which brings the aesthetic, moral, and religious interests into relation with those concepts of the world which have their origin in natural science." He rejects the narrow sensationalist doctrine of perception and also basing scientific methods purely on Baconian induction, claiming that the true method of discovery also necessitates a flight of the creative imagination "controlled by the requirements of coherence and logic".
In doing so he builds a cosmology based on "actual entities" or "actual occurrences" ,drops of experience which flow into one another creating a never-ending process of experiences .In Whitehead's words , actual entities are "complex and interdependent" Each actual entity can be subdivided into a series of prehensions which are vectors taking in "emotion, and purpose, and valuation, and causation". We relate to one another through prehensions and our evaluation of them. All perception is embodied – our body is the yardstick of relatedness and relationships. The integration of feelings, past events, ideas and our subjective aim (pointing to the future) concresces into an actual entity which then fades away to be incorporated into other actual entities as "stubborn" facts. Each drop of experience takes in (prehends) the whole of our past and selects from a universe of eternal objects or potentialities (an extension of Platonic forms), abstractions, facts, propositions, groups of actual events called "societies", and "nexus" or relations between actual events. These prehensions are compared, contrasted, valuated sifted, and integrated by the subjective aim in a series of stages and it is only in the later stages of completion that we become conscious towards one complex integral feeling called a satisfaction. So many operations are performed subconsciously that Whitehead asserts "in general consciousness is negligible"
Each actual entity is a novel creative act in which the whole universe (the many) participates. Whitehead says " the many become one and are increased by one". We can see the actual world as a process, and that the process is the becoming of actual entities. Every being (actual or non-actual) "is a potential for every becoming. But equally every becoming leads to a change in being (new actual entity). "The feeler is the unity emergent from its own feelings;" "An actual entity is at once the subject experiencing and the superject (object) of its experience. "There is both a physical pole and a mental pole to each actual entity. The physical pole enables the prehending of other actual activities while the mental pole enables the prehension of eternal objects. Experience is always an amalgam of conceptual thought and feeling., while the feeling tone of our subjective aim lures us on into the future.
Hume and Kant were mistaken in making presentational immediacy through the senses, the primary stage of experience with causal efficacy a secondary stage or inference. Whitehead claims that we learn causal efficacy through the "witness" of our body, when we are touched or touch (physically or mentally), we are moved in some way. Infants learn cause and effect through their bodies, exploring the world through feeling pleasure and pain, fear and joy in our bodies. For Whitehead causal efficacy is the primary function. He says "The more primitive types of experience are concerned with sense reception, and not with sense-perception."
The only absolute in Whitehead's philosophy is creativity which produces novelty, Novelty, however ,does not presuppose order, so God is introduced as the agent of creativity, who evaluates eternal objects, lures actual entities towards order, absorbing them within himself and participating in their joys and sorrow. Whitehead says "the universe is thus a creative advance into novelty."
For Whitehead, even an ordinary physical object is a society of actual occurrences, which endures through repeating its history or structure over time e.g chairs, rocks,clouds, crystals and molecules. Living organisms are also structured societies whose ability to achieve goal-seeking, consciousness and creativity becomes greater as we move up the scale from primitive organisms to man.
This is a book well worth reading but it needs to be read a number of times to be really understood. Whitehead's writing style is dense, he uses a lot of his own terminology and there are very few examples.
I recommend supplementing you reading with watching short introduction videos on Process Thought by Jay MacDaniel or longer lectures by Matthew Segall.
My only criticism of Whitehead's ideas is that his notion of God as a jack of all trades, playing a number of different roles is hardly credible.
Nevertheless, this book is far ahead of its time with its ideas of embodied notion and cognition Perhaps if Whitehead were alive today he would incorporate Jungian archetypes as an additional composite entity, and use Rupert Shaldrake's ideas of Morphic Resonance.
March 20, 2024
The book is practically unreadable. Whitehead is known as one of the denser reads in a subject matter that is awash with dense reads. I'm sorry, but it seems to me that he is purposefully obscuring his points. He gives no examples to illustrate his meaning. Since the foundation of a philosophy is to define your terms, most philosophers are careful to at least make clear what they mean by their peculiar references. Whitehead does nothing to make it clear what he is trying to say. Perhaps he defined his terms in the classroom, and it is his students who have given him his high reputation. I will have none of that. That is mere pretension. Philosophy should give a person a new way to see the world, not obscure it.
August 11, 2023
ANW tweaking the dials of Hume, Locke, and Descartes and subsequently smelting them into one big alloy called “Philosophy of Organism”. It’s filled to the brim with jargon. Mountains and mountains of jargon. I left it thinking a guy reading this and a guy reading Spinoza would differ by the former having a headache and the latter feeling pretty good about themselves afterwards.
Whitehead is obviously a brilliant guy, and he occasionally has some nice lines in here, but his penchant for mathematical formalism really drags this down considerably.
Whitehead is obviously a brilliant guy, and he occasionally has some nice lines in here, but his penchant for mathematical formalism really drags this down considerably.
October 18, 2015
Although I claim to have read this, I haven't read every last word, and its a book hat requires rereading. It's a lifelong project. Stunning book, completely changed my understanding of the world and what we are doing here. Also extremely useful in my professional life, forms the basis for a new kind of design practice. All that said, the book is one of the most difficult things I have ever read, bar none.
Read
November 8, 2019This is one that I won't really know what to say or think about for another few months, and maybe another several metaphysicians. Read it if you're into the interdependence (/co-creating) of all things and reality-as-becoming and such things. There was also some geometry but I blacked out during those parts.
Read
May 9, 2020Can't believe I just read 350 pages about Why Things Actually Exist And How You Can Be Sure...and it was kind of worth it? Except maybe the part near the end where it became math and he almost lost me.
May 21, 2020
Well, "liking" is not really the scale against which to rate this book, but anyway.
I have spent about 25 years telling myself I should read this book, and made a couple of desultory efforts. It's done. Now to start over again and see what more of it I can understand....
I have spent about 25 years telling myself I should read this book, and made a couple of desultory efforts. It's done. Now to start over again and see what more of it I can understand....
September 8, 2008
While Whitehead's magnum opus is admittedly dense, it is a treasure trove of philosophical genius. A must-read for anyone interested in the "other side" of Western philosophical thought.
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