Studying Whitehead's Process
and Reality with John Cobb
by Jay McDaniel
During my graduate studies, I had the privilege of taking two classes under John Cobb. One focused on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, where we studied Process and Reality, and the other explored Christian-Buddhist dialogue. Both courses left a lasting impression on me, not just because of the subject matter but because of John’s unique teaching style, which I came to understand as profoundly "proposative" in nature.
In the Whitehead course, we spent time discussing Whitehead’s concept of "propositions" as "lures for feeling." During one such discussion, John drew an intriguing connection between Whitehead’s use of the term "propositions" and the word "proposal." He suggested that propositions could be understood as proposals—ideas put forth for consideration rather than dogmas to be accepted uncritically. He then casually remarked that a Whiteheadian approach to teaching would naturally be, in his words, "proposative" in spirit.
This proposative approach stood in contrast to more didactic teaching methods, where instructors present a fixed and authoritative set of truths that students are expected to accept without question. It also avoided the pitfalls of a purely open-ended approach, where the teacher offers no guiding content, leaving students adrift in unstructured conversation. Instead, John’s proposative style balanced these extremes. He presented ideas as invitations for exploration—concepts to ponder, discuss, and evaluate.
John’s teaching sessions typically began with him speaking for about twenty minutes, during which he introduced ideas and framed the discussion, building upon paragraphs in Process and Reality.(He assigned none of his own books or secondary texts.) Afterward, the floor opened up for dialogue. Often, we struggled to grasp the complex concepts he presented, prompting him to elaborate further. Yet even in his explanations, John’s tone and manner remained proposative. He never imposed ideas upon us or pressured us to adopt them. Instead, he shared thoughts in a way that encouraged reflection and inquiry. His delivery was casual rather than dogmatic, inviting rather than insistent.
He was very clear that Whitehead's philosophy was itself a complex set of proposals - some metaphysical, some empirical, and some as lyrical -and that often but not always Whitehead's appeal was to intuition. The ideas were to be tested against experience, including both personal experience and evidence received from other sources of knowledge, including science, psychology, art, and religion. And he was equally clear that Whitehead's ideas are themselves in process: that what people "do" with Whitehead includes adaptations, revisions, alterations, and, if needed, downright rejections.
There were students in our class—at least one—who rejected almost all of it from the outset. This particular student was a fairly convinced Wittgensteinian and understood Wittgenstein as debunking the metaphysical enterprise. John disagreed, but he also treated the student with respect, making it clear that there might be wisdom in the critique. There was nothing dogmatic in John’s manner of teaching. We got the sense that John himself was always open to critique and questioning, and that he had a capacity to relativize his own points of view and listen, with sincerity, to views that contradicted his own.
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John's course stretched our minds beyond anything we had theretofore imagined. John casually noted that Whitehead would lie awake at night asking questions we never imagined. We agreed. Who among us had thought about relations between pure potentialities of the objective species and those of the subjective species, much less the very idea that things can be real as potentials, but not actual. Taking Whitehead under John was by all means an intellectual adventure—an adventure of ideas. And John's manner of explanation—in presenting the idea of eternal objects, or prehensions, or actual entities, or subjective forms—were often new to us and excitingly difficult to understand. I say "excitingly" for a reason. Studying with and under John was, for me and many others (but not the Wittgensteinian), exciting.
Typically,as noted above, the ideas from Whitehead presented as "proposals" were themselves presented as they emerged from particular paragraphs and sections of Process and Reality. As John offered his twenty-minute intro, we would turn to the paragraph, read what Whitehead said, and then consider the idea, with help from John. So you might call his approach "text-evoked" as well as proposative. He wanted to be faithful to Whitehead's text and ideas.
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As I remember, John was particularly focused on making sure our class didn’t think Whitehead’s cosmology was only about God. Instead, it was about an organic universe in which God played an important role. Whitehead’s key ideas—the eight categories of existence along with Creativity and God—were central to the proposals we studied. If I had to highlight the core ideas that John emphasized in the course—or at least the ones that stood out most to me while reading Process and Reality with him—it would be these ten:
- Actual Entities – The basic units of reality, each a process of unifying past influences into a new moment of experience.
- Eternal Objects – Timeless possibilities or forms that actual entities can incorporate into their processes.
- Prehensions – The ways actual entities feel and respond to the influences of other entities.
- Nexus – Groups or networks of actual entities that form patterns of connection.
- Subjective Forms – The specific ways actual entities experience or interpret the influences they prehend.
- Propositions – Potentialities or ideas about how reality might unfold, providing aims for creative action.
- Multiplicities – Collections of entities or possibilities that can be unified in various ways.
- Contrasts – The combinations of differences that create meaningful patterns or harmonies.
- Creativity – The ultimate principle underlying all processes of becoming and change: the self-creativity of each moment of experience and the creative advance into novelty of the universe as a whole.
- God – A source of novel possibilities and a companion to the world, guiding processes toward beauty and harmony without coercion.
When I teach Process and Reality to others, as I’ve often done with college undergraduates, I tell them that mastering these ten ideas is a big step toward understanding Whitehead.
But these were not the only ideas. I recall vividly discussing hybrid physical prehensions, experience in the mode of causal efficacy, perception in the mode of presentational immediacy, the extensive continuum, and questions of value, harmony, and intensity (the self-enjoyment of a concrescing subject). But all seemed framed in terms of eight categories and the two additional ideas (Creativity and God).
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We students were also asked to trace an idea through the text that was presented by Whitehead in different ways and present the idea in a one-on-one oral exam at the end of the course. The idea that I traced was transmutation. This task of tracing an idea was itself an exercise in proposative thinking. It required us to engage deeply with Whitehead’s text, considering the evolution of concepts and testing their relevance to our own experiences and reflections. In doing so, we came to appreciate the fluid and evolving nature of philosophical inquiry, a hallmark of John Cobb’s teaching method.
And we were asked, on our own, to read another of Whitehead's books. I read Modes of Thought. John assigned no secondary texts; no books that he himself had written; and we got the feeling that he was not too keen on our reading secondary texts before reading Whitehead in the original.
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I recall one particular moment when we turned our focus to Whitehead’s understanding of God. A student in the class asked a question that suggested Whitehead’s concept of God captured “what God really is.” John paused for a moment and then gently responded, “God may be ‘something like’ this.” He emphasized that Whitehead’s ideas about God should be understood as proposals, not definitive statements. John reminded us that any concept of God—no matter how profound—remains, in essence, a map, not the territory itself. He drew attention to the distinction between experiencing God and conceptualizing God, emphasizing that the reality of God is always more than our experience or ideas about God. Whitehead’s concept of God was one way of thinking about divine presence in an evolving universe, but it did not—could not—fully capture the mystery and depth of divine reality.
I remember one day when John had to miss class. A conference was being held in Claremont on, as I recall, the rights of nature. The conference included a visit, on John's part, to a local indigenous community where elders from the tribe guided John and others in the activity of getting down on the ground, ears to soil, to hear the voices of ancestors. John came back the next week, and shared the experience with the class. Although he knew "modern" perspectives, eschewing such ideas, would reject the very idea; he was quite open to it, adding that Whitehead's notion of "objective immortality" and "feeling the feelings" of the past might help us be open to such possibilities. Such was his own openness to the world.
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In the class it was apparent to all of us that we were in the presence of a teacher who was brilliant, kind, analytical, imaginative, and, not least, curious about the world and the many disciplines that are part of the modern university. The class was in Whitehead's "philosophy" but, for John., the value of Whitehead's philosophy is that it could help link, help us see connections between, so many different areas of thought: economics, aesthetics, literature, physics, education, biology, and mathematics, for example. In this breadth of interest, he inspired us to want to think beyond whatever pigeonholes we were confined to. Yes, he was a philosophical theologian - but he was interested in so much more than philosophy and theology. It was 'all' connected for him, and his very example of being curious about the world, and openness to interconnections, inspired us.
We left his class thinking that the value of Whitehead's philosophy was not just that it might help us "explain" things or "understand" reality. It was that it would encourage us to be curious and open, like our professor, and avoid pigeonholes. I am sure it is this that has affected me to try to develop, in my own small way, a website - Open Horizons - that includes essays on a wide and eclectic array of topics, all of which, thanks to Whitehead and John, seem connected.
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Of course, we didn't leave the class without writing a term paper and having a final examination. My term paper was on transmutation which, in Whitehead’s philosophy, refers to the process by which data from the world are transformed into feelings or subjective experiences within an actual entity. It highlights how the external world becomes internalized through prehensions and contributes to the formation of new realities. For Whitehead, transmutation is not merely a passive reception but an active transformation, demonstrating how each actual entity integrates the past into its own becoming. This idea underscored for me the deeply relational and dynamic nature of existence in Whitehead’s system. I have been "transmuting John's class for many years now, and adding some transmutations of my own. This very page is a transmutation of his influence on me.
And then there was the final exam, itself an oral exam. As individuals taking the class, we would meet John in his office and, as I recall, be asked three questions about Whitehead. The first would be a softball question such as "What is an actual entity?" The second a little more difficult, such as: "What is the extensive continuum and how does Whitehead think it is related to the ontological status of the future?" The third would be, typical of John, the "So What" question: "Why does any of this matter?" To the latter, of course, there was not a final answer, but he was interested in our response, for our own sake.
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I think there were about twenty students in the class. Some left the class inspired by Whitehead's Process and Reality and wanting to know more, while others left having had their fill of cosmology and metaphysics. I realized then, as I realize now, that reading Process and Reality in depth is for some, but not all. Still, I think everyone left being inspired by, and grateful to, John Cobb. They were inspired by his proposative method of teaching, by his openness to new ideas, by his humility and capacity for self-criticism, and by the sheer range of his thinking. He seemed, and was, interested in everything: economics, spirituality, aesthetics, physics, politics, agriculture, biology, morality, literature, and more. He thought it was "all" connected and that Whitehead's philosophy can help us see the connections or, at the very least, inspire us to look for them. We agreed with him. Yes, he was a philosophical theologian. But we had never met a theologian like John - a theologian whose humility and openness were as inspiring as his ideas. A theologian whose proposative style was contagious such that we, too, became more open, more interested, more curious, more adventurous, more engaged.
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Whitehead's Eight Categories of Existence
plus Creativity and God
Actual Entities
An actual entity is a moment of concrescence—a moment of experience in which the many entities of the past actual world are felt and gathered into the unity of a subjective whole. In each actual entity, "the many become one, and are increased by one." This gathering includes the self-creativity and self-enjoyment of the entity, as it unifies influences from the past and brings forth something new. Actual entities are multiple and thus different from one another. Each entity arises with its own distinct characteristics, shaped by its unique prehensions and subjective forms. Once completed, an actual entity perishes as a subjective experience but continues to exist objectively, contributing to future moments of experience. This process exemplifies the dynamic nature of reality—each actual entity participates in the ongoing creative advance of the universe by transforming the past into novelty.
Prehensions
Prehensions refer to the ways actual entities relate to and "take account of" one another. This concept captures how an entity feels or grasps another entity—not conceptually, but experientially. Prehensions are the building blocks of relationships, with each actual entity prehending others through positive (inclusive) or negative (exclusive) feelings. These prehensive relations allow all things to participate in one another’s becoming, embodying the interconnectedness of all entities.
Nexus (or Nexūs)
A nexus is a network of actual entities related through shared prehensions, forming structured webs of interconnected experiences. Some nexūs take on enduring forms called societies, where occasions of experience inherit common characteristics from one another, creating patterns of continuity.
- Corpuscular societies: These consist of relatively stable entities, such as atoms or molecules, which persist across time by maintaining coherence.
- Personally ordered societies: These are sequences of experiences that form personal identities, such as the stream of consciousness that constitutes a person’s life. Each occasion builds on its predecessors, creating personal continuity and coherence over time.
Nexūs and societies reveal how individual occasions of experience participate in larger patterns of becoming, connecting everything from microscopic particles to human lives in an ongoing process of transformation.
Subjective Forms
Subjective forms refer to the emotional or qualitative tone that shapes how an entity experiences the world. These forms influence how prehensions are integrated, giving each experience a unique emotional quality. For example, one person might feel rain as melancholic, while another experiences it as refreshing. Subjective forms guide how entities respond to and integrate the influences they prehend, adding emotional depth to experience.
Eternal Objects
Eternal objects are pure potentials—abstract qualities or possibilities that actual entities can take up in their becoming. They are not confined to any specific event but exist as timeless potentials. For example, the quality "redness" is an eternal object that can manifest across different instances and contexts. Eternal objects provide the abstract building blocks that influence the unique character of each experience.
Propositions
Propositions are lures for feeling—imaginative suggestions that invite actual entities to explore certain possibilities. They function as speculative invitations, guiding the creative process by proposing how things might be. A proposition is not merely a factual statement but a suggestion for novelty and change. For example, an artist may consider a proposition that offers a new way to combine colors. Propositions help entities integrate new potentials, influencing both artistic creation and practical problem-solving.
Multiplicities
Multiplicities are diverse entities that exist in disjunction from one another. They may consist of actualities (such as actual entities) or potentialities (such as eternal objects). As truly distinct, multiplicities are not yet unified into the togetherness of an actual occasion of experience. A particular moment of experience (or actual entity) gathers these disparate elements into unity, but outside such unification, the universe remains a multiplicity. In this sense, multiplicities represent the richness of possibilities that are yet to be integrated.
Contrasts
Contrasts refer to patterns of difference or opposition that are either harmonized or remain in tension within experiences. These contrasts give shape and complexity to reality by bringing together opposing elements. For example, a melody is enriched by contrasts between high and low notes, and a life story is enriched by the interplay of joy and sorrow. Contrasts are essential to the depth and texture of experience, embodying both harmony and tension within each moment.
Creativity
Creativity is the “ultimate of ultimates,” the underlying activity expressed in all actualities. It manifests as the self-creativity of each actual entity through concrescence—the integration of many influences into a unified moment of experience. This process also involves transition, where the subjective immediacy of an entity perishes but lives on as objectively immortal in the experiences of future entities. Creativity is the driving force behind the novelty in the universe, enabling the ongoing process of becoming through which the past transforms into something new.
God
God encompasses three aspects, offering a relational and evolving presence in the universe:
- Primordial Nature - This is God's conceptual aspect, holding all eternal objects as pure possibilities. It represents the timeless realm of potentiality, offering the raw materials from which new experiences emerge.
- Consequent Nature - This is God’s empathic reception of all that happens, integrating every experience into the divine life. God feels the world, weaving all joys and sufferings into a coherent whole, continuously expanding in response to the world's becoming. God’s consequent nature ensures that no moment of experience is ever lost, as every event contributes to the unfolding divine reality.
- Super-jective Nature - This is God's influence on the world, luring creatures toward new possibilities. The superjective nature represents the way God inspires and persuades actual entities toward greater beauty, truth, and harmony, without coercion. God’s power lies not in domination but in invitation—offering new possibilities and guiding the world toward creative advance.
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