Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

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 [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write from the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, July 10, 2024

ChatGPT 4.0 and I Discuss Whitehead v Kant: References and Discussions



"Frankly, it is my opinion that succeeding fourth and fifth generation Whiteheadians will need to re-work Whitehead's thought per the infinitely arrayed organic structures of the universe, with the processualism metaphysic which plays amongst the universe's ontologies, including the compassionate value ethics which are prevelently inherited within the structures of negentropic evolution. As a late fourth generation acquirer of process (sic, Whitehead --> Griffin --> Cobb --> myself).
I've lately given myself to the task of educator / teacher for some years now as attempting to marry processual philosophy to processual theology to processual science to processual cultures and processual ecological societies. The common foundation of Whiteheadian organic process philosophy makes this easy enough on the upper layers of academic disciplines but requires some constructivism by specialized experts in their fields in application to the layers lying underneath each polemic in order to re-right Western analytic thought away from its materialism and towards the continuity of organism and organistic value processes throughout the metaverses of our being including that of the very universe itself.
As such, I find in Whitehead a renewal of the ancient and the promise for the future. It links the past to the present and gives hope to the future. And like any proper, compassionate, faith or religion, I find such a philosophical undertaking helpful in the re-orientation of society and nature away from mitigating self-destruction and positively towards generational renewal, commitment, thrival, and purpose."
- R.E. Slater

ChatGPT 4.0 & I Discuss
Whitehead v Kant:
References and Discussions


Additional References to the last post:


Critique of Pure Feeling: Kant and Whitehead
by Matthew Segall



Kant, Whitehead and Reality: Beyond Materialism
by Matthew Segall



Crossing the Threshold: The Post Kantian
Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead
by Matthew Segall  |  June 30, 2023

Professor of philosophy Matthew D. Segall returns to Rev Left to discuss his newest book, which is based on his disseratation, titled "Crossing the Threshold: Etheric Imagination in the Post-Kantian Process Philosophy of Schelling and Whitehead". Together, they discuss the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Schelling, and Alfred North Whitehead, and work through the vision of the cosmos - and of our place in it - that emerges from their work.



This book is a philosophical experiment in thinking, feeling, and willing beyond the transcendental threshold of Immanuel Kant's critical philosophy. It draws inspiration from the organic process philosophies of F. W. J. Schelling and A. N. Whitehead to articulate a descendental aesthetic ontology showing the way across the epistemological chasm that Kant's critiques hewed between knowledge and reality. This descendental inversion of Kantian transcendentalism aims to bridge the chasm-not by resolving the structure of reality into clear and distinct concepts-but by replanting cognition in the aesthetic processes that power it. The key to this reconnection is found in a new etheric power of imagination, which if consciously cultivated can grant the process philosopher direct experience of the cosmic creativity expressing itself in both the depths of the soul and throughout the physical world. With human knowing no longer conceived of as a transcendental onlooker but rather rooted again in cosmogenesis, the ancient hermetic maxim that we are microcosmic participants in the Life of the Whole is reaffirmed.


Alfred North Whitehead was among the first initiates into the twentieth century’s new cosmological story. In this newly revised and expanded edition, Segall both sets Whitehead’s philosophy of organism in historical context and brings it into conversation with key elements of contemporary scientific cosmology—including relativistic, quantum, evolutionary, and complexity theories. It lays bare the inadequacy of the materialistic-mechanistic metaphysical interpretation of these theories and exemplifies the contributions Whitehead’s cosmological scheme can make to the urgent transdisciplinary project of integrating natural science with the presuppositions of human civilization. The latest scientific discoveries reveal a universe that is nearly crying aloud for an ensouled reinterpretation, one in which, for example, physics and chemistry would no longer be merely descriptions of the meaningless motion of molecules to which biology is ultimately reducible, but rather themselves become studies of creative self-organization at ecological scales other than the biological.


Whitehead was among the first initiates into the 20th century’s new cosmological story. This book bring’s Whitehead’s philosophy of organism into conversation with several components of contemporary scientific cosmology—including relativistic, quantum, evolutionary, and complexity theories—in order to both exemplify the inadequacy of the traditional materialistic-mechanistic metaphysical interpretation of them, and to display the relevance of Whitehead’s cosmological scheme to the transdisciplinary project of integrating these theories and their data with the presuppositions of human civilization. This data is nearly crying aloud for a cosmologically ensouled interpretation, one in which, for example, physics and chemistry are no longer considered to be descriptions of the meaningless motion of molecules to which biology is ultimately reducible, but rather themselves become studies of living organization at ecological scales other than the biological.


by Matthew David Segall | Apr 18, 2010

I explore the ideas of thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, Francisco Varela, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson, and Alf Hornborg in an attempt to critique both techno-industrial capitalism and mechanistic biology. I offer the beginnings of an integral response to market cosmology.












Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854) spent his philosophical career striving to realize the Absolute system, but he did so in full recognition of the fact that the Absolute is not finally a logical system, but a living actuality. Accordingly, for Schelling, “life is the criterion of truth.” Though his critics often dismissed his thought as fragmentary and protean, C. S. Peirce, in a letter to William James, remarked that it was precisely Schelling’s “freedom from the trammels of system” and willingness to approach philosophical ideas experimentally rather than dogmatically that he admired most: “In that, he is like a scientific man.” This book, written in the context of a resurgence of interest in Schelling's work, as well as during a planetary ecological emergency and geo-political crisis, draws upon the deep well of his thought in the hope that it can aid human civilization’s attempt to re-imagine itself. Schelling's philosophy provides many of the anthropological, theological, and cosmological resources necessary for bringing forth an alternative form of modernity no longer bent on the destruction of earth and the disintegration of human communities.


I explore the ideas of thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead, Francisco Varela, Jean Gebser, William Irwin Thompson, and Alf Hornborg in an attempt to critique both techno-industrial capitalism and mechanistic biology. I offer the beginnings of an integral response to market cosmology.










Integral Imaginings, by Matthew David Segall (Author) | December 15, 2011

The essays compiled herein are written on behalf of earth, the ground upon which I walk and the soil into which I will one day return. They contain the thought-traces of a thinker in love with wisdom.












* * * * *

ChatGPT 4.0 and I Discuss Kant & Whitehead

by R.E. Slater
July 10, 2024

Hi

ChatGPT
Hello! How can I assist you today?
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Please compare Alfred North Whitehead's "Process Philosophy" 
to Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason."

ChatGPT

Comparing Alfred North Whitehead's "Process Philosophy" to Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" involves examining two distinct philosophical systems, each with its own unique perspective on the nature of reality, knowledge, and experience.

Alfred North Whitehead's Process Philosophy

Key Concepts:

  1. Process and Change: Whitehead's philosophy emphasizes that reality is not composed of static substances but of ongoing processes and events. He posits that everything is in a state of flux.
  2. Actual Entities: The fundamental units of reality are "actual entities" or "occasions of experience," which are interrelated and constantly evolving.
  3. Prehensions: These are the ways in which entities interact with and influence each other. Prehensions can be positive (contributory) or negative (eliminative).
  4. Eternal Objects: These are abstract forms or potentials that actual entities can realize. They are similar to Platonic forms and provide a means for understanding the possibilities inherent in the processes of becoming.
  5. God: In Whitehead's system, God is not a static being but a process that interacts with the world, influencing and being influenced by it. God provides a source of novelty and order.

Philosophical Implications:

  • Metaphysics of Becoming: Whitehead's emphasis on process and change leads to a metaphysics that focuses on becoming rather than being.
  • Interconnectedness: His view underscores the interconnected nature of all entities, suggesting a holistic view of the universe.
  • Temporal Reality: Time and temporality are central to understanding the nature of reality, as everything is in a constant state of development and evolution.

Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Key Concepts:

  1. Transcendental Idealism: Kant posits that our experience of reality is shaped by the way our mind structures sensory input. We can never know things-in-themselves (noumena), only the phenomena that appear to us.
  2. A Priori Knowledge: Kant distinguishes between a priori (independent of experience) and a posteriori (dependent on experience) knowledge. He argues that certain fundamental concepts (such as space, time, and causality) are a priori and shape all our experiences.
  3. Categories of Understanding: Kant identifies twelve categories of understanding that the mind uses to organize experiences, such as causality, unity, and plurality.
  4. Synthetic A Priori Judgments: These are judgments that extend our knowledge and are necessarily true, forming the basis of much of science and mathematics.
  5. Limits of Reason: Kant argues that reason has limits and that attempting to go beyond these limits leads to contradictions and illusions (antinomies).

Philosophical Implications:

  • Epistemology: Kant's work significantly contributes to epistemology by arguing that the mind plays an active role in shaping our experiences.
  • Phenomenon and Noumenon: This distinction creates a dualism between the world as it appears to us and the world as it is in itself.
  • Foundation of Modern Philosophy: Kant's critical philosophy serves as a foundation for much of modern Western philosophy, influencing both analytic and continental traditions.

Comparison

1. Ontology:

  • Whitehead: Focuses on becoming and process, where reality is seen as dynamic and evolving.
  • Kant: Emphasizes the distinction between phenomena (the world as we experience it) and noumena (the world as it is in itself).

2. Epistemology:

  • Whitehead: Knowledge is derived from the processes and interactions of actual entities.
  • Kant: Knowledge is structured by the a priori categories of the mind, and we can only know phenomena, not things-in-themselves.

3. Metaphysics:

  • Whitehead: Metaphysics is centered around the idea of interrelated processes and the interconnectedness of all entities.
  • Kant: Metaphysics is constrained by the limits of human reason, which can only deal with phenomena and not the ultimate nature of reality.

4. Role of God:

  • Whitehead: God is an evolving process that interacts with the world.
  • Kant: God is part of the noumenal realm and cannot be known through reason alone.

5. Nature of Reality:

  • Whitehead: Reality is fundamentally characterized by change and development.
  • Kant: Reality is mediated by our perceptual and cognitive faculties, which shape our experience of the world.

In summary, Whitehead's process philosophy and Kant's critical philosophy offer contrasting views on reality and knowledge. Whitehead emphasizes dynamic processes and interconnectedness, while Kant focuses on the structures of the mind that shape our experience and the limitations of human reason.

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What are Kant's "Ten Categories"
and what is a Category?

ChatGPT
Immanuel Kant’s "Categories" are central to his philosophy, specifically in his work "Critique of Pure Reason." They are part of his broader framework of transcendental idealism, which asserts that our experience of reality is mediated by the mind's inherent structures. Kant posits twelve categories rather than ten, which are fundamental concepts that the mind uses to organize and interpret sensory data.

What is a Category?

In Kantian philosophy, a category is a pure concept of the understanding that is used by the mind to structure experiences. Categories are a priori, meaning they are innate and not derived from experience. They function as the foundational elements through which all empirical knowledge is processed and understood. Without these categories, sensory data would be chaotic and unstructured, making coherent experience and knowledge impossible.

Kant's Twelve Categories

Kant groups the twelve categories into four classes, each with three categories. These categories correspond to different aspects of how we perceive and understand the world:

  1. Quantity:

    • Unity: The concept of one or a single entity.
    • Plurality: The concept of more than one or multiple entities.
    • Totality: The concept of a complete or whole set of entities.
  2. Quality:

    • Reality: The concept of existence or being.
    • Negation: The concept of non-existence or the absence of being.
    • Limitation: The concept of something being finite or limited in some way.
  3. Relation:

    • Inherence and Subsistence (Substance and Accident): The concept of something that exists independently (substance) and something that exists in another (accident).
    • Causality and Dependence (Cause and Effect): The concept that one thing (cause) brings about another (effect).
    • Community (Reciprocal Action or Interaction): The concept of mutual influence between entities.
  4. Modality:

    • Possibility: The concept of something that can exist or happen.
    • Existence (Actuality): The concept of something that does exist or is happening.
    • Necessity: The concept of something that must exist or happen.

Significance of the Categories

  1. Structuring Experience: The categories provide the necessary framework for synthesizing sensory data into coherent experiences. Without them, perceptions would be disjointed and incomprehensible.

  2. A Priori Knowledge: Since the categories are a priori, they form the basis for certain universal and necessary aspects of knowledge. For example, the category of causality allows us to understand that events are linked by cause and effect relationships.

  3. Phenomenal World: The categories apply only to the phenomenal world—the world as we experience it. They do not apply to the noumenal world—the world of things-in-themselves, which we cannot know directly.

  4. Critical Philosophy: Kant’s theory of categories is part of his critical philosophy, which seeks to explore the limits and capabilities of human reason. By identifying the categories, Kant shows how the mind actively shapes our experience of reality, thus bridging the gap between rationalist and empiricist philosophies.

Summary

Kant’s twelve categories are fundamental concepts used by the mind to organize and interpret sensory data. They are essential for structuring coherent experiences and form the basis for much of our a priori knowledge. Understanding these categories is crucial for grasping Kant’s broader project of transcendental idealism, which argues that while we can know the world of phenomena (appearances), we cannot know the noumenal world (things-in-themselves).

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Does Whitehead use Kant's Categories or have something like them?
And if he did, what are Whitehead's "Categories?"

ChatGPT

Alfred North Whitehead does indeed incorporate a structured framework similar to Kant's categories, though his approach and terminology differ significantly due to his process-oriented metaphysics. Whitehead’s "categories" are part of his broader philosophical system known as process philosophy, which emphasizes becoming, change, and the interrelation of events over static being.

Whitehead's Categories

Whitehead’s categories are outlined in his major work, "Process and Reality." He introduces several key categories and concepts that function to structure our understanding of reality within his processual framework.

1. Categories of Existence: These categories refer to the different kinds of entities that exist in Whitehead's metaphysical scheme.

  • Actual Entities: The fundamental units of reality, also known as "actual occasions." These are the basic building blocks of the universe, characterized by their process of becoming.
  • Prehensions: The ways in which actual entities interact with and relate to each other. Prehensions can be positive (contributory) or negative (eliminative).
  • Nexus (Plural: Nexūs): Groupings or societies of actual entities that are interrelated and form complex structures.
  • Eternal Objects: Abstract forms or potentials that actual entities can realize. They provide the realm of possibilities for the processes of becoming.

2. Categories of Explanation: These categories offer a way to explain how actual entities operate and interact within the framework of process philosophy.

  • Subjective Aim: The internal purpose or drive of an actual entity towards a specific realization of its potential.
  • Superject: The outcome of the process of becoming, where an actual entity attains its final state and influences subsequent entities.
  • Concrescence: The process through which an actual entity integrates various prehensions into a unified experience.
  • Satisfaction: The final phase of an actual entity's concrescence, where it achieves a determinate state and contributes to future processes.

3. Categories of Subjective Forms: These categories describe how actual entities experience and interpret their prehensions.

  • Emotional Forms: Feelings or affective tones associated with prehensions.
  • Conceptual Forms: Intellectual or abstract aspects of prehensions.
  • Satisfaction Forms: The final state of an actual entity, integrating all prehensions and subjective forms into a coherent whole.

4. Ontological Principle: A foundational principle stating that the reasons for the existence of actual entities and their characteristics are always found within the process of actual entities themselves.

Comparison with Kant’s Categories

While Whitehead's categories serve a similar structural role in his philosophy as Kant’s categories do in his, there are significant differences:

1. Nature of Reality:

  • Kant: Focuses on static categories that structure human experience of phenomena. The categories are a priori concepts that apply to all possible experiences.
  • Whitehead: Emphasizes dynamic processes and the interconnectedness of events. His categories describe how entities become and relate to one another in a constantly changing reality.

2. Role of Entities:

  • Kant: Deals with categories of understanding that apply universally to objects of experience.
  • Whitehead: Deals with actual entities and their processes of becoming, focusing on the relational and developmental aspects of reality.

3. Metaphysical Assumptions:

  • Kant: Works within a dualistic framework, separating phenomena (the world as experienced) from noumena (the world as it is in itself).
  • Whitehead: Rejects such dualism, positing a monistic process-oriented view where everything is interconnected and in a state of flux.

Summary

Whitehead's categories are integral to his process philosophy, providing a framework for understanding the dynamic and interrelated nature of reality. They are conceptually similar to Kant's categories in that they structure our understanding, but they differ fundamentally in their focus on process, change, and relationality rather than static being and fixed structures. Whitehead's categories describe how entities come into being, interact, and contribute to the ongoing process of reality, aligning with his metaphysical emphasis on becoming and interconnectedness.

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Since both philosopher's works are a hundred years old or older what kinds of philosophies
or philosopher's have updated or replaced Kantian Idealism and Whitehead's Processualism?

ChatGPT
Philosophy has evolved significantly since the times of Kant and Whitehead, with many thinkers building upon, critiquing, or offering alternatives to their ideas. Below are some notable developments and philosophers who have updated or replaced aspects of Kantian Idealism and Whitehead’s Process Philosophy:

Updates to Kantian Idealism

1. Neo-Kantianism:

  • Ernst Cassirer: Emphasized the role of symbolic forms in human understanding, expanding Kant’s ideas into the realms of culture, language, and science.
  • Hermann Cohen: Focused on the role of science and logic, arguing for a rigorous, scientific form of idealism.

2. Phenomenology:

  • Edmund Husserl: Developed a method for studying the structures of consciousness, emphasizing intentionality and the lived experience. Although not strictly Kantian, Husserl’s work retains a focus on how phenomena appear to consciousness.
  • Martin Heidegger: Built on Husserl’s phenomenology and critiqued Kant’s focus on epistemology, emphasizing ontology and the nature of being.

3. Analytic Philosophy:

  • Wilfrid Sellars: Critiqued the "Myth of the Given," challenging the idea that we can have immediate, non-conceptual knowledge of the world. Sellars sought to integrate empirical knowledge with philosophical analysis.
  • Gareth Evans and John McDowell: Worked on theories of perception and mind, integrating Kantian insights into contemporary discussions in philosophy of mind and epistemology.

4. Critical Theory:

  • Jürgen Habermas: Expanded Kantian ideas into social theory, focusing on communicative action and the role of rational discourse in society.

5. Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction:

  • Michel Foucault: Examined the relationship between power and knowledge, critiquing the universalist assumptions of Kantian thought.
  • Jacques Derrida: Deconstructed traditional philosophical concepts, including those rooted in Kantian dualisms, emphasizing the fluidity and instability of meaning.

Updates to Whitehead’s Process Philosophy

1. Process Thought:

  • Charles Hartshorne: Further developed Whitehead’s ideas, especially in the philosophy of religion, emphasizing panentheism and the dynamic nature of God.
  • David Ray Griffin: Integrated process philosophy with ecological and postmodern thought, focusing on issues like environmental ethics and sustainability.

2. Systems Theory and Cybernetics:

  • Ludwig von Bertalanffy: Developed General Systems Theory, which shares with process philosophy an emphasis on interrelatedness and dynamic systems.
  • Norbert Wiener: Pioneered cybernetics, the study of systems, control, and communication in animals and machines, aligning with processual thinking about dynamic interactions.

3. Continental Philosophy:

  • Gilles Deleuze: Influenced by Whitehead, developed a philosophy of becoming, emphasizing difference, multiplicity, and the dynamic processes of reality.
  • Henri Bergson: While earlier, his ideas on time, change, and creativity resonated with process philosophy and influenced later thinkers like Deleuze.

4. Post-Modern Philosophy:

  • Jean-François Lyotard: Explored the implications of postmodernity on knowledge, emphasizing the fluidity and temporality of truth claims, in a manner somewhat resonant with process philosophy.

5. Environmental Philosophy:

  • Arne Næss: Founder of Deep Ecology, which aligns with process thought in its emphasis on interconnectedness and the intrinsic value of nature.
  • Val Plumwood: Developed ecofeminism, critiquing dualisms and emphasizing relationality and interdependence, themes central to process philosophy.

Contemporary Philosophical Trends

1. Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism:

  • Richard Rorty: Critiqued the search for absolute foundations in philosophy, advocating for a more contingent, context-dependent approach to knowledge and truth.
  • Hilary Putnam: Developed internal realism, blending elements of Kantian idealism with pragmatic considerations about truth and reality.

2. Embodied Cognition and Enactivism:

  • Francisco Varela and Evan Thompson: Emphasized the embodied, enactive nature of cognition, resonating with process philosophy’s focus on dynamic interaction and relationality.

3. Speculative Realism:

  • Quentin Meillassoux: Critiqued the correlationism of post-Kantian philosophy, arguing for a speculative approach to reality that acknowledges the independence of the world from human thought.
  • Graham Harman: Developed Object-Oriented Ontology, emphasizing the autonomy of objects and their interactions, aligning with process philosophy’s focus on interrelations.

Summary

Philosophers have built upon, critiqued, and reinterpreted the ideas of Kant and Whitehead, leading to diverse and rich philosophical traditions. From Neo-Kantianism and phenomenology to process thought and contemporary pragmatism, the influence of these foundational thinkers persists in various updated and expanded forms. These developments reflect an ongoing engagement with issues of knowledge, reality, and experience, continually adapting to new contexts and challenges.

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Comparing the information above can it be said that in some sense Kant
or Whitehead continues to pervade postmodern or metamodern thought?

ChatGPT

Yes, it can be said that both Kant and Whitehead continue to pervade postmodern and metamodern thought in various ways. Their foundational ideas have been reinterpreted, critiqued, and expanded upon, shaping contemporary philosophical discourse. Here’s how their influences manifest in postmodern and metamodern thought:

Kant’s Influence

Postmodern Thought:

  • Critique of Universalism: Postmodern philosophers like Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida critique the universalist assumptions of Kantian thought. However, their work often engages deeply with Kantian ideas, such as the limits of reason and the conditions of possibility for knowledge.
  • Deconstruction: Derrida’s deconstruction can be seen as an extension of Kant’s critical project, examining the instability and contingency of meaning within language and texts.
  • Power and Knowledge: Foucault’s exploration of the relationship between power and knowledge builds on Kant’s insights into how structures of understanding shape our experience of reality.

Metamodern Thought:

  • Synthesis of Opposites: Metamodernism often seeks to reconcile or oscillate between modern and postmodern ideas. Kant’s dialectical method and his synthesis of empirical and rational elements in his epistemology resonate with this approach.
  • Revisiting Universalism: Some metamodern thinkers revisit the idea of universal principles, albeit in a more flexible and contextual manner than Kant’s original formulations. This reflects a desire to find common grounds without the rigidity of Enlightenment universalism.

Whitehead’s Influence

Postmodern Thought:

  • Process and Relationality: Whitehead’s emphasis on process and relationality is echoed in postmodern critiques of static, essentialist metaphysics. Thinkers like Gilles Deleuze draw on Whitehead’s process philosophy to articulate a dynamic, fluid ontology.
  • Interconnectedness: Postmodern environmental and ecological philosophies often draw on Whitehead’s ideas to emphasize the interconnectedness of all entities and the importance of holistic thinking.

Metamodern Thought:

  • Dynamic Systems: Metamodernism’s focus on complexity, systems thinking, and interdependence aligns closely with Whitehead’s process philosophy. This perspective sees reality as composed of dynamic, interrelated processes rather than static substances.
  • Holistic Approaches: Whitehead’s holistic approach to understanding reality influences metamodern thought’s emphasis on integration and synthesis across different domains of knowledge and experience.

Key Themes Connecting to Kant and Whitehead

1. Epistemological Reflection:

  • Kant: The limits of knowledge and the conditions under which knowledge is possible remain central concerns.
  • Whitehead: The relational nature of knowledge and the process of becoming continue to shape contemporary epistemological debates.

2. Ontological Considerations:

  • Kant: The distinction between phenomena and noumena influences ongoing discussions about the nature of reality and our access to it.
  • Whitehead: The idea of a dynamic, interconnected universe informs contemporary metaphysical discussions.

3. Ethical and Political Implications:

  • Kant: The emphasis on autonomy, moral law, and the categorical imperative influence ongoing debates in ethics and political philosophy.
  • Whitehead: The focus on interconnectedness and the impact of individual actions on the whole resonates with contemporary environmental and ethical thought.

Summary

Both Kant and Whitehead continue to influence postmodern and metamodern thought, albeit in different ways. Kant’s critical philosophy provides a foundation for understanding the limits and conditions of knowledge, while Whitehead’s process philosophy offers a dynamic, relational view of reality. Contemporary philosophers build on, critique, and reinterpret their ideas, ensuring that their legacies persist in shaping the evolving landscape of philosophical thought.

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How would a philosopher describe an integral theory of everything and are there philosophical theories which might be good applicants in replacing past integral theories such as Platonism, Aristotlelianism, Scholasticism, or Enlightenment Theory?

ChatGPT

An integral theory of everything in philosophy would be an attempt to create a comprehensive framework that unites all aspects of human knowledge and experience into a coherent whole. Such a theory would need to encompass various domains, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, and the natural and social sciences, striving to provide a unified understanding of reality.

Key Characteristics of an Integral Theory of Everything

1. Holistic Approach:

  • Interconnectedness: Recognizes the interconnected nature of all phenomena, emphasizing the relationships and interactions between different elements of reality.
  • Integration: Seeks to integrate insights from diverse fields and disciplines into a unified framework.

2. Multidimensional:

  • Levels of Reality: Acknowledges multiple levels or dimensions of reality, from physical and biological to psychological, social, and spiritual.
  • Complexity: Embraces the complexity of the world, understanding that different levels of reality interact in dynamic and often non-linear ways.

3. Evolutionary Perspective:

  • Process and Change: Views reality as an ongoing process of evolution and development, where new forms and structures emerge over time.
  • Developmental Stages: Recognizes stages of development or evolution in various domains, from individual psychological growth to societal progress.

4. Inclusiveness:

  • Diverse Perspectives: Incorporates diverse perspectives and methodologies, valuing both scientific and humanistic approaches.
  • Pluralism: Embraces philosophical pluralism, recognizing that different traditions and viewpoints can contribute valuable insights to the whole.

Contemporary Philosophical Theories as Applicants

Several contemporary philosophical theories aspire to provide such a comprehensive framework, potentially serving as successors to past integral theories like Platonism, Aristotelianism, Scholasticism, or Enlightenment Theory. Here are a few notable examples:

1. Integral Theory (Ken Wilber):

  • AQAL Model: Wilber’s "All Quadrants, All Levels" (AQAL) model integrates four dimensions of reality (interior/individual, interior/collective, exterior/individual, exterior/collective) and various levels of development.
  • Holons: Recognizes that everything in the universe is a whole/part (a "holon") that is both a whole in itself and a part of larger wholes.
  • Developmental Stages: Proposes a series of developmental stages for both individuals and societies, integrating insights from psychology, spirituality, and sociology.

2. Process Philosophy (Alfred North Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne):

  • Dynamic Reality: Emphasizes the dynamic and processual nature of reality, where everything is in a state of becoming and interrelation.
  • Panentheism: Integrates theology and metaphysics, positing that God is intimately involved in the processes of the world.
  • Relational Ontology: Focuses on the relationships and interactions between entities as the fundamental constituents of reality.

3. Systems Theory and Cybernetics:

  • Interconnected Systems: Views the world as composed of complex, interconnected systems that exhibit self-regulation and adaptive behavior.
  • Feedback Loops: Emphasizes the importance of feedback mechanisms in maintaining the stability and evolution of systems.
  • Holistic Analysis: Applies to various fields, from biology and ecology to sociology and economics, providing a comprehensive framework for understanding complex phenomena.

4. Phenomenology and Existentialism (Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty):

  • Lived Experience: Focuses on the structures of lived experience and the ways in which individuals encounter the world.
  • Embodiment: Emphasizes the role of the body in shaping our experience and understanding of reality.
  • Being and Time: Heidegger’s existential phenomenology explores the nature of being and the temporality of human existence.

5. Post-Structuralism and Deconstruction (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault):

  • Fluid Meanings: Emphasizes the fluidity and contingency of meaning, critiquing fixed structures and universal truths.
  • Power and Knowledge: Foucault’s analysis of the relationship between power and knowledge offers a comprehensive framework for understanding social dynamics and institutions.
  • Textual Analysis: Derrida’s deconstruction provides tools for analyzing texts and cultural artifacts, revealing the underlying assumptions and contradictions.

6. Pragmatism and Neo-Pragmatism (John Dewey, Richard Rorty):

  • Practical Consequences: Focuses on the practical implications and consequences of ideas, valuing experiential and experimental approaches.
  • Pluralism and Contingency: Emphasizes philosophical pluralism and the contingency of truth claims, advocating for a flexible and adaptive approach to knowledge.
  • Democracy and Education: Dewey’s emphasis on democracy and education as central to human flourishing provides a comprehensive social and ethical framework.

Summary

An integral theory of everything would aim to unify diverse domains of knowledge and experience into a coherent, comprehensive framework. Contemporary philosophical theories such as Ken Wilber’s Integral Theory, Process Philosophy, Systems Theory, Phenomenology, Post-Structuralism, and Pragmatism offer promising approaches for developing such a framework. Each of these theories incorporates elements of holism, multidimensionality, evolution, and inclusiveness, seeking to address the complexity and interconnectedness of reality in a way that resonates with the integral ambitions of past philosophical traditions.

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Can Alain Badious' theory of "Being and Event"
be described as an integral theory?

ChatGPT

Alain Badiou’s theory of "Being and Event" is a significant contribution to contemporary philosophy, but it differs in several ways from what might be traditionally understood as an integral theory of everything. However, Badiou’s work does seek to integrate various aspects of ontology, mathematics, politics, and the theory of the subject, making it a comprehensive and influential framework. Here’s an exploration of how Badiou’s "Being and Event" aligns with and diverges from integral theories:

Key Concepts in Badiou’s "Being and Event"

1. Ontology and Mathematics:

  • Set Theory: Badiou uses mathematical set theory as the foundation for his ontology, arguing that mathematics is the ultimate language of being.
  • Multiple: He emphasizes the concept of the multiple over the one, challenging traditional notions of unity and substance in metaphysics.

2. The Event:

  • Event: An event is a radical occurrence that disrupts the normal order of things and brings about a new situation or truth.
  • Intervention: Subjects are created through their intervention in an event, which reconfigures their relation to the existing order.

3. Truth and Fidelity:

  • Truth Procedures: Badiou identifies four domains where truths can emerge: science, art, politics, and love. Each domain has its own procedures for generating and recognizing truths.
  • Fidelity: The commitment to an event and the process of maintaining fidelity to the truth it reveals is central to Badiou’s theory.

4. The Subject:

  • Subjectivation: Subjects are formed through their fidelity to an event, embodying the truths that the event brings forth.
  • Generic Humanity: Badiou’s concept of the subject is universal and generic, transcending individual differences and focusing on the collective dimension of human experience.

Comparison with Integral Theories

1. Holistic Approach:

  • Badiou: While Badiou’s theory integrates multiple domains (science, art, politics, love), it does so within a specific framework of ontology and truth, rather than seeking a holistic synthesis of all knowledge.
  • Integral Theories: Typically aim for a more comprehensive integration of diverse fields, including natural and social sciences, spirituality, and humanities.

2. Multidimensionality:

  • Badiou: Focuses on the multiplicity and the role of events in generating new truths, but does not explicitly address multiple levels or dimensions of reality in the same way integral theories do.
  • Integral Theories: Often emphasize multiple levels of reality or stages of development (e.g., Ken Wilber’s AQAL model).

3. Evolutionary Perspective:

  • Badiou: The concept of the event introduces an element of disruption and transformation, but Badiou does not frame this within a broader evolutionary context.
  • Integral Theories: Typically incorporate an evolutionary perspective, seeing development and progression as fundamental aspects of reality.

4. Inclusiveness:

  • Badiou: While his theory is inclusive of different truth procedures, it is primarily focused on the transformative potential of events and the fidelity of subjects to these events.
  • Integral Theories: Aim to inclusively synthesize diverse perspectives and methodologies, often emphasizing a pluralistic and integrative approach.

Summary

Alain Badiou’s "Being and Event" is a profound and comprehensive framework that integrates aspects of ontology, mathematics, politics, and the theory of the subject. While it shares some similarities with integral theories, such as a focus on transformation and the role of events in shaping reality, it differs in its specific approach and scope. Badiou’s work is more focused on the nature of being, the structure of events, and the formation of subjects through fidelity to events, rather than aiming for a holistic synthesis of all domains of knowledge and experience.

In conclusion, Badiou’s "Being and Event" can be seen as a significant philosophical framework with integrative elements, but it is not an integral theory in the broader sense typically associated with holistic and evolutionary synthesis. It remains a crucial and influential contribution to contemporary thought, particularly in its unique approach to ontology and the role of events in the emergence of truths.

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Thank you. I would like to compare Whiteheadian thought to the
various listed integral theories mentioned above at a later time.
Please file and save under "Kant v. Whitehead." Bye.

ChatGPT

Got it! I've saved the discussion for later comparison. If you need anything else in the future, feel free to reach out. Bye!


Tuesday, July 9, 2024

Who Is Alfred North Whitehead?


Alfred North Whitehead 
(1861-1947)

[all brackets are mine + a few linked references + typo edits - res / r.e. slater]

this article is provided by:

At Harvard, Whitehead supervised Willard van Orman Quine's Ph.D. thesis on the Russell and Whitehead Principia Mathematica. Russell and Quine would become giants in the twentieth-century fields of logical positivism and logical empiricism. Although logical positivism and later analytic language philosophy would overwhelm Whiteheadian "process" thinking in philosophy departments, Whitehead's "process theology" has grown strong in divinity schools around the world. And "Whiteheadian" physicists, impressed by Whitehead's analysis of events in space and time in special relativity as organic "occasions" are prominent in debates about the role of quantum mechanics in consciousness and panpsychism.

Whitehead in a Nutshell

Before he came to Harvard, Whitehead wrote three important books while at Trinity College, Cambridge, that put forth his speculative theories on space, time, matter, and energy - An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (PNK , 1919), The Concept of Nature (CN, 1920), and Principle of Relativity (PoR, 1922):

In PNK Whitehead calls the instantaneous and infinitesimal points of special relativity "event-particles." (p.33) He then says that the events of his theory will include large numbers of "event-particles" because his events are extended in both space and time, an idea he calls "extensive abstraction."(p.101) It is only these finite volumes of space and durations in time that can be perceived or apprehended by an observer. Whitehead is correct that perceivable happenings always involve relatively large numbers of material particles interacting over a period of time, especially biological events.

In CN Whitehead argues against what he calls the "bifurcation of nature" (p.24) that divides the world into the appearance of sense-data (the empiricist's secondary qualities) and the "reality" of the molecules and light energy that are the causes (or primary qualities). For Whitehead there is only one nature. He also argues against the notion of absolute space and time, claiming that the important information is the matter in space and the relative positions of bits of matter.

In PoR Whitehead develops a principle of relativity that differs in significant and erroneous ways from the special and general theories of Einstein's relativity, oddly claiming, for example, that "the ether is an observed character of things observed." (p.5) He developed explanations for shifts in spectroscopic line wavelengths (p.70) and for the splitting of lines that turn out not to have been correct.

Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" analyzes the perception of experience as a continuing series of discrete "events" that are created and destroyed. He goes beyond the simple materialist view of elementary particles interacting in space and time, merely following the laws of classical and quantum mechanics. Beyond the atomic particles and the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, and beyond the conservation laws for energy and momentum, Whitehead sees an "organic" evolutionary process of creation and valuation.

We need to understand what it is exactly that Whitehead thinks is being created and why it can serve as a basis for values. We will argue that Whitehead's process is "organic" because it explains evolution, not merely biological evolution but the cosmic evolution of the galaxies, stars, and planets, as well as the creation of all matter from the primordial elementary particles.

In addition to his deep understanding of mathematics, Whitehead may have understood the development of modern physics better than any living philosopher in his day. He saw the greatest invention of the nineteenth century as the invention of the method of invention, namely the scientific method and newly created scientific information, but even more deeply, the means by which novel ideas of all kinds are created.

Whitehead identified four great novel ideas as the new nineteenth-century foundations of physical science, fields, particles, conservation principles, and evolution.

"One of the ideas is that of a field of physical activity pervading all space, even where there is an apparent vacuum. This notion had occurred to many people, under many forms. We remember the medieval axiom, nature abhors a vacuum....

"Thus in the seventies of the last century, some main physical sciences were established on a basis which presupposed the idea of continuity.

The great question for Whitehead as a mathematician - "Is nature continuous or discrete, fields or particles, infinities or a finite number of objects?"
"On the other hand, the idea of atomicity had been introduced by John Dalton, to complete Lavoisier’s work on the foundation of chemistry. This is the second great notion. Ordinary matter was conceived as atomic: electromagnetic effects were conceived as arising from a continuous field...The notion of matter as atomic has a long history. Democritus and Lucretius will at once occur to your minds. In speaking of these ideas as novel, I merely mean relatively novel,..In the eighteenth century every well-educated man read Lucretius, and entertained ideas about atoms. But John Dalton made them efficient in the stream of science; and in this function of efficiency atomicity was a new idea.

"The influence of atomicity was not limited to chemistry. The living cell is to biology what the electron and the proton are to physics.

"The remaining pair of new ideas to be ascribed to this epoch are both of them connected with the notion of transition or change. These are the doctrine of the conservation of energy, and the doctrine of evolution.

"The doctrine of energy has to do with the notion of quantitative permanence underlying change. The doctrine of evolution has to do with the emergence of novel organisms as the outcome of chance. The theory of energy lies in the province of physics. The theory of evolution lies mainly in the province of biology, although it had previously been touched upon by Kant and Laplace in connection with the formation of suns and planets."

Although he starts with the latest science, Whitehead also builds on the ancient problem of the One and the Many, distinctions between the Parmenidean One/Being and the Heraclitean/Democritean flux/many/becoming. He describes the thinking of the mind as a succession of transitions in which many entities become a new unity, a one, after which the new unity/entity becomes part of a new many, etc., etc. He describes this as an organic process.

By starting with the many, Whitehead reads the Platonic divided line from right to left.

Theories (noesis)   Hypotheses (dianoia)Techniques (pistis)   Stories (eikasia)

Whitehead's preference [was] for organism over mechanism:

  1. emphasizes the importance of time (HegelBergson)
  2. restores immaterial mind/purpose/telos (BerkeleyAlexanderLloyd Morgan), and
  3. recognizes creativity as a process that cannot be understood in deterministic/mechanistic terms.

Whether the mind works as a succession of many-to-one-to-many transitions should be left to modern psychology and neuroscience, but information philosophy has clarified the way in which the mind records and reproduces its experiences, as well as the cosmic creative process behind every new information structure in the universe and any new idea in a mind.

Whitehead's process thinking is influential with some quantum physicists who see quantum waves as possibilities collapsing to become particle actualities. Some so-called Quantum Whiteheadians are panpsychists, who see mind [ = soul or consciouness] as in all things. Others are panentheists who see everything as a part of God or God in everything.

The Sources of Whitehead's Ideas
Whitehead was an extraordinary mathematician who read widely in ancient and modern philosophy. He is said to have memorized many parts of the great Kantian critique and its architectonic of categories, which Whitehead emulated in Process and Reality. But Whitehead also took a great interest in the science of his times. His readings of relativity and quantum mechanics greatly influenced the creation of his philosophy and "theology," which is arguably free of any conventional notion of a God, but rather as a discovery of the process that produces reality, and thus fits many theists' definition of a God.

We can see now that Whitehead actually understood very little of these two pillars of modern physics [...the science being new to his era. - res]. He misinterpreted both Albert Einstein's relativity and Niels Bohr's quantum theory. But we can identify two basic elements that he borrowed from them to ground his understanding of the nature of reality as a process.

From relativity he took the idea of an event in space and time. His British idealist colleague John McTaggart had formulated two ideas of time. Whitehead likely preferred McTaggart's A-series, which is both the common sense view and the metaphysical view now known as presentism. McTaggart's B-series is the notion that all times, and thus all events, past, present, and future, are all existent and equally real. This is the view of special relativity. [This latter seems to appropriately be a referral to dimensional time and space - res].

Albert Einstein's four-dimensional space-time was called a "block universe" by Hermann Minkowski. In such a universe causal relations are explained by what Whitehead called "simple location" in space-time. Each event can be caused by something in its past "light cone" and in turn the event has a causal influence over events in its future "light cone.

This is the deterministic Laplacian universe in which a super-intelligence can know the complete past and the single possible future from knowledge of the positions and velocities of all the material particles at the one instant of the present. It was actually Gottfried Leibniz who saw this universe as a consequence of continuous differential equations using his calculus or Isaac Newton's fluxions. Whitehead rejected this reductive view as "scientific materialism."

From quantum mechanics Whitehead took the notion that nature is discontinuous and discrete from Bohr's "old quantum theory" with his "quantum jumps" between discrete energy levels. Perhaps under the influence of Henri Bergson's duration theory of time as discrete intervals, Whitehead analyzed an event, a moment in space-time, stretching it out to a duration or interval between a beginning and an end time, which he later called an "occasion."

From inside that interval, one can look back to perceive the many past events, any or all of which may contribute to this moment seen as a single event, a single cause that will affect many future, as yet unrealized, events.

Which of those past events are selected, and Whitehead's unique contribution is to see that a selection may combine together a large number of past events as causes, introduces an element of novelty and creation. Whitehead's "process" is very far from the simplistic idea of a single causal chain of event-cause-event-cause, etc. And as a temporal process, it is not the familiar Hegelian dialectic of thesis (idea) - antithesis (criticism) - synthesis (Aufhebung) spiraling upward to the ultimate Absolute Idea.

Borrowing from the language of the British empiricists John LockeDavid Hume, and especially George Berkeley, Whitehead describes his process as subjective perceptions forming concepts about objects. He views the immediate present subject as perceiving the past events (now simply objects) and freely choosing some of them (he calls this prehending them) to be combined in new ways (he calls this concretion or concrescence - a growing together) to create a new idea or concept (he calls a creature), which immediately falls into the past light cone (he calls this perishing), becoming just one more object. Some of the past many have become a new one, which can join the future many, converging onto future events that will again each become one.

Whitehead's Philosophical Works

In his Lowell Lectures of 1925 (which became the classic book Science and the Modern World), Whitehead railed against "scientific materialism" and the deterministic claims of science. In his preface, he describes his goal,

"The present book embodies a study of some aspects of Western culture during the past three centuries, in so far as it has been influenced by the development of science. This study has been guided by the conviction that the mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sections of the communities in question...

"Philosophy, in one of its functions, is the critic of cosmologies. It is its function to harmonise, re-fashion, and justify divergent intuitions as to the nature of things. It has to insist on the scrutiny of the ultimate ideas, and on the retention of the whole of the evidence in shaping our cosmological scheme. Its business is to render explicit, and—so far as may be—efficient, a process which otherwise is unconsciously performed without rational tests.

"Bearing this in mind, I have avoided the introduction of a variety of abstruse detail respecting scientific advance. What is wanted, and what I have striven after, is a sympathetic study of main ideas as seen from the inside. If my view of the function of philosophy is correct, it is the most effective of all the intellectual pursuits. It builds cathedrals before the workmen have moved a stone, and it destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches. It is the architect of the buildings of the spirit, and it is also their solvent: —and [wherein? - res] the spiritual precedes the material. Philosophy works slowly. Thoughts lie dormant for ages; and then, almost suddenly as it were, mankind finds that they have embodied themselves in institutions."

Whitehead proceeds to build a new philosophy of the spirit and mind that bases nature on the concept of organism, and not upon the concept of matter. Like Plato (to whom Whitehead is perhaps the most famous footnote), Whitehead privileges form over content, the ideal over the material world. Although he claims to avoid the "abstruse detail" about science, he elaborates a complex and often obscure vocabulary of terms to describe the process of thought that creates the eternal ideas, based on the mind's perception of experiences. Whitehead's writing style is dense, with mesmerizing repetitive variations on his basic themes, like G.W.F.Hegel, whose philosophy Whitehead learned from the equally verbose British idealists F.H.Bradley and John McTaggart.

Like the empiricist George Berkeley who denied the material world to stress the immaterial ideas that we create through our perceptions, Whitehead's philosophy of organism invents a dense language to describe and analyze the process of thinking. Where "esse est percipi," to be is to be perceived, was Berkeley's motto, we might say Whitehead believed that his dialectical analysis of the "process" of perception and conception will reveal the true reality as the sum of our experiences. For Whitehead and for Berkeley, the process of a subject perceiving objects and thinking with concepts is reality.

Whitehead calls for a wider field of abstraction than that used in the scientific field of thought; [that] we should have in our minds a more concrete (sic) analysis of our concepts, which will stand nearer to the "complete concreteness of our intuitive experience." Whitehead's notions of concrete, concretion, even his later concrescence may blur the usual mapping of the ideal/material dualism onto the abstract/concrete.

Whitehead's call for wider "thinking about thinking" as an organic process extends "ideas" from the mind of God to the interactions of elementary particles as enduring "patterns" over time. He also introduces "eternal objects" (perhaps the Platonic Forms?) that are outside of time.

"Such an analysis should find itself a niche for the concepts of matter and spirit, as abstractions in terms of which much of our physical experience can be interpreted. It is in the search for this wider basis for scientific thought that Berkeley is so important. He launched his criticism shortly after the schools of Newton and Locke had completed their work, and laid his finger exactly on the weak spots which they had left. I do not propose to consider either the subjective idealism which has been derived from him, or the schools of development which trace their descent from Hume and Kant respectively. My point will be that—whatever the final metaphysics you may adopt—there is another line of development embedded in Berkeley, pointing to the analysis which we are in search of. Berkeley overlooked it, partly by reason of the over-intellectualism of philosophers, and partly by his haste to have recourse to an idealism with its objectivity grounded in the mind of God. You will remember that I have already stated that the key of the problem lies in the notion of simple location. Berkeley, in effect, criticises this notion."
We are now boldfacing Whitehead's critical new terms.

Whitehead quotes Francis Bacon's Natural History as claiming that "all bodies whatsoever, though they have no sense, yet they have perception". He then replaces standard terms like perception with variant terms that do not imply an ordinary sensing being. He italicizes the important terms, to say

I construed perception (as used by Bacon) as meaning taking account of the essential character of the thing perceived, and I construed sense as meaning cognition. We certainly do take account of things of which at the time we have no explicit cognition. We can even have a cognitive memory of the taking account, without having had a contemporaneous cognition. Also, as Bacon points out by his statement,'. . . for else all bodies would be alike one to another,' it is evidently some element of the essential character which we take account of, namely something on which diversity is founded and not mere bare logical diversity. The word perceive is, in our common usage, shot through and through with the notion of cognitive apprehension. So is the word apprehension, even with the adjective cognitive omitted. I will use the word prehension for uncognitive apprehension: by this I mean apprehension which may or may not be cognitive. Now take Euphranor's last remark:

'Is it not plain, therefore, that neither the castle, the planet, nor the cloud, which you see here, are those real ones which you suppose exist at a distance?' Accordingly, there is a prehension, here in this place, of things which have a reference to other places.

Now go back to Berkeley's sentences, quoted from his Principles of Human Knowledge. He contends that what constitutes the realisation of natural entities is the being perceived within the unity of mind.

We can substitute the concept, that the realisation is a gathering of things into the unity of a prehension; and that what is thereby realised is the prehension, and not the things. This unity of a prehension defines itself as a here and a now, and the things so gathered into the grasped unity have essential reference to other places and other times.

Here Whitehead introduces the core idea of his process philosophy, the process of prehensive unification, a development of the ideas of Bacon, Berkeley, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz.
For Berkeley's mind, I substitute a process of prehensive unification. In order to make intelligible this concept of the progressive realisation of natural occurrences, considerable expansion is required, and confrontation with its actual implications in terms of concrete experience. This will be the task of the subsequent lectures. In the first place, note that the idea of simple location has gone. The things which are grasped into a realised unity, here and now, are not the castle, the cloud, and the planet simply in themselves; but they are the castle, the cloud, and the planet from the standpoint, in space and time, of the prehensive unification. In other words, it is the perspective of the castle over there from the standpoint of the unification here. It is, therefore, aspects of the castle, the cloud, and the planet which are grasped into unity here. You will remember that the idea of perspectives is quite familiar in philosophy. It was introduced by Leibniz, in the notion of his monads mirroring perspectives of the universe. I am using the same notion, only I am toning down his monads into the unified events in space and time. In some ways, there is greater analogy with Spinoza's modes; that is why I use the terms mode and modal. In the analogy with Spinoza, his one substance is for me the one underlying activity of realisation individualising itself in an interlocked plurality of modes. Thus, concrete fact is process. Its primary analysis is into underlying activity of prehension, and into realised prehensive events. Each event is an individual matter of fact issuing from an individualisation of the substrate activity. But individualisation does not mean substantial independence.

An entity of which we become aware in sense perception is the terminus of our act of perception. I will call such an entity, a sense-object... The way in which such an entity is related to space during a definite lapse of time is complex. I will say that a sense-object has ingression into space-time.

Thus primarily space-time is the locus of the modal ingression of sense-objects. This is the reason why space and time (if for simplicity we disjoin them) are given in their entireties. For each volume of space, or each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or of all lapses of time. The difficulties of philosophy in respect to space and time are founded on the error of considering them as primarily the loci of simple locations. Perception is simply the cognition of prehensive unification; or more shortly, perception is cognition of prehension. The actual world is a manifold of prehensions; and a 'prehension' is a 'prehensive occasion'; and a prehensive occasion is the most concrete finite entity, conceived as what it is in itself and for itself, and not as from its aspect in the essence of another such occasion...

There are more entities involved in nature than the mere sense-objects, so far considered. But, allowing for the necessity of revision consequent on a more complete point of view, we can frame our answer to Berkeley's question as to the character of the reality to be assigned to nature. He states it to be the reality of ideas in mind. A complete metaphysic which has attained to some notion of mind, and to some notion of ideas, may perhaps ultimately adopt that view. It is unnecessary for the purpose of these lectures to ask such a fundamental question. We can be content with a provisional realism in which nature is conceived as a complex of prehensive unifications. Space and time exhibit the general scheme of interlocked relations of these prehensions. You cannot tear any one of them out of its context. Yet each one of them within its context has all the reality that attaches to the whole complex. Conversely, the totality has the same reality as each prehension; for each prehension unifies the modalities to be ascribed, from its standpoint, to every part of the whole. A prehension is a process of unifying. Accordingly, nature is a process of expansive development, necessarily transitional from prehension to prehension. What is achieved is thereby passed beyond, but it is also retained as having aspects of itself present to prehensions which lie beyond it.

Thus nature is a structure of evolving processes. The reality is the process. It is nonsense to ask if the colour red is real. The colour red is ingredient in the process of realisation. The realities of nature are the prehensions in nature, that is to say, the events in nature...

An event has contemporaries. This means that an event mirrors within itself the modes of its contemporaries as a display of immediate achievement. An event has a past. This means that an event mirrors within itself the modes of its predecessors, as memories which are fused into its own content. An event has a future. This means that an event mirrors within itself such aspects as the future throws back onto the present, or, in other words, as the present has determined concerning the future. Thus an event has anticipation...

These conclusions are essential for any form of realism. For there is in the world for our cognizance, memory of the past, immediacy of realisation, and indication of things to come.

Whitehead here follows the nineteenth-century romantics and anticipates the late twentieth-century turn away from analytic philosophy to literature and the humanities for values.
I propose in the first place to consider how the concrete educated thought of men has viewed this opposition of mechanism and organism. It is in literature that the concrete outlook of humanity receives its expression. Accordingly it is to literature that we must look, particularly in its more concrete forms, namely in poetry and in drama, if we hope to discover the inward thoughts of a generation...

A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation...

Of course, we find in the eighteenth century Paley's famous argument, that mechanism presupposes a God who is the author of nature. But even before Paley put the argument into its final form, Hume had written the retort, that the God whom you will find will be the sort of God who makes that mechanism. In other words, that mechanism can, at most, presuppose a mechanic, and not merely a mechanic but its mechanic. The only way of mitigating mechanism is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.

When we leave apologetic theology, and come to ordinary literature, we find, as we might expect, that the scientific outlook is in general simply ignored.

Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Whitehead see what Alasdair MacIntyre would call the "dark at the core of the enlightenment" and that Ludwig Wittgenstein would rephrase in the last line of his Tractatus as what cannot be said, only can be shown. "The rest is silence."
Wordsworth in his whole being expresses a conscious reaction against the mentality of the eighteenth century. This mentality means nothing else than the acceptance of the scientific ideas at their full face value. Wordsworth was not bothered by any intellectual antagonism. What moved him was a moral repulsion. He felt that something had been left out, and that what had been left out comprised everything that was most important. Tennyson is the mouthpiece of the attempts of the waning romantic movement in the second quarter of the nineteenth century to come to terms with science. By this time the two elements in modern thought had disclosed their fundamental divergence by their jarring interpretations of the course of nature and the life of man. Tennyson stands in this poem as the perfect example of the distraction which I have already mentioned. There are opposing visions of the world, and both of them command his assent by appeals to ultimate intuitions from which there seems no escape. Tennyson goes to the heart of the difficulty. It is the problem of mechanism which appalls him.
" "The stars,' she whispers, 'blindly run.' "
If an organism is reducible to its molecules, which blindly run following Newtonian laws alone, the mind and responsibility are illusions
This line states starkly the whole philosophic problem implicit in the poem. Each molecule blindly runs. The human body is a collection of molecules. Therefore, the human body blindly runs, and therefore there can be no individual responsibility for the actions of the body. If you once accept that the molecule is definitely determined to be what it is, independently of any determination by reason of the total organism of the body, and if you further admit that the blind run is settled by the general mechanical laws, there can be no escape from this conclusion. But mental experiences are derivative from the actions of the body, including of course its internal behaviour. Accordingly, the sole function of the mind is to have at least some of its experiences settled for it, and to add such others as may be open to it independently of the body's motions, internal and external.

There are then two possible theories as to the mind. You can either deny that it can supply for itself any experiences other than those provided for it by the body, or you can admit them.

Whitehead is right that scientific materialism can not explain valuation and moral responsibility
If you refuse to admit the additional experiences, then all individual moral responsibility is swept away. If you do admit them, then a human being may be responsible for the state of his mind though he has no responsibility for the actions of his body. The enfeeblement of thought in the modern world is illustrated by the way in which this plain issue is avoided in Tennyson's poem. There is something kept in the background, a skeleton in the cupboard. He touches on almost every religious and scientific problem, but carefully avoids more than a passing allusion to this one...

Whitehead is wrong that "endurance" is unique to organisms. He is right that organisms have a "plan" or purpose, including, even in the smallest organisms, a kind of mentality, an immaterial manager of their creativity and bodily maintenance processes
The doctrine which I am maintaining is that the whole concept of materialism only applies to very abstract entities, the products of logical discernment. The concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it. In the case of an animal, the mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached. Thus an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes the mental state. But the principle of modification is perfectly general throughout nature, and represents no property peculiar to living bodies. In subsequent lectures it will be explained that this doctrine involves the abandonment of the traditional scientific materialism, and the substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism.

I shall not discuss Mill's determinism, as it lies outside the scheme of these lectures. The foregoing discussion has been directed to secure that either determinism or free will shall have some relevance, unhampered by the difficulties introduced by materialistic mechanism, or by the compromise of vitalism. I would term the doctrine of these lectures, the theory of organic mechanism.

Molecules do not differ in their intrinsic character, but when part of an organism, they are governed by processes that implement the organism's own purposes
In this theory, the molecules may blindly run in accordance with the general laws, but the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves.
Here Whitehead has given us the first few elements of his philosophy of organism. The mind can "supply experiences other than those provided by the body." "Mental states enter into the plan of the total organism and thus modify the plans of the successive subordinate organisms until the ultimate smallest organisms, such as electrons, are reached." "Molecules may blindly run in accordance with the general laws, but the molecules differ in their intrinsic characters according to the general organic plans of the situations in which they find themselves." This is all well and good, except that Whitehead is wrong about electrons and other material particles. They have no internal plans and purposes of their own.

We have bolded terms that will acquire very specific technical meanings for Whitehead in his next two works, especially in his magnum opus Process and Reality.

A year later, in 1926 Whitehead gave a second set of Lowell Lectures, this time at King's Chapel in Boston. They were published as Religion in the Making. Whitehead's embrace of religion and his idea of God account for his continued success among a subset of philosophers and theologians. His work is a throwback to before the presocratics who stopped explaining physical processes as the work of gods.

Recent editions of Religion in the Making have a technical glossary of terms, which is very helpful. The first two lectures include a brief history of religion, the major faiths and their dogmas. In lecture 3, "Body and Spirit," Whitehead builds on a few terms from Science and the Modern World, such as abstract, actual, event, experience, character, prehension, unification. He adds new terms, familiar words with new technical meanings, and several new terms - concretion, creature, creativity, entity, epochal, indetermination, realisation, occasion His magnum opus, Process and Reality, will again expand the Whitehead jargon, but much is here. See our draft of a Whitehead glossary below.

In the second half of the book, Whitehead begins to speak with terminology that is at once familiar yet jarring in his apparent meaning. The Dean of the Divinity School of the University of Chicago remarked on his first reading, "It is infuriating, and I must say embarrassing as well, to read page after page of relatively familiar words without understanding a single sentence."

There are many ways of analyzing the universe, conceived as that which is comprehensive of all that there is. In a description it is thus necessary to correlate these different routes of analysis. First, consider the analysis into (1) the actual world, passing in time; and (2) those elements which go to its formation. Such formative elements are not themselves actual and passing; they are the factors which are either non-actual or non-temporal, disclosed in the analysis of what is both actual and temporal.

They constitute the formative character of the actual temporal world. We know nothing beyond this temporal world and the formative elements which jointly constitute its character. The temporal world and its formative elements constitute for us the all-inclusive universe. These formative elements are:

1. The creativity whereby the actual world has its character of temporal passage to novelty.

2. The realm of ideal entities, or forms, which are in themselves not actual, but are such that they are exemplified in everything that is actual, according to some proportion of relevance.

3. The actual but non-temporal entity whereby the indetermination of mere creativity is transmuted into a determinate freedom...

A further elucidation of the status of these formative elements is only to be obtained by having recourse to another mode of analysis of the actual world.

The actual temporal world can be analyzed into a multiplicity of occasions of actualization. These are the primary actual units of which the temporal world is composed. Call each such occasion an "epochal occasion." Then the actual world is a community of epochal occasions. In the physical world each epochal occasion is a definite limited physical event, limited both as to space and time, but with time-duration as well as with its full spatial dimensions.

Whitehead's version of relativity is that things are not simply located in some absolute space and time, but are only located relative to all other things in the universe.
The epochal occasions are the primary units of the actual community, and the community is composed of the units. But each unit has in its nature a reference to every other member of the community, so that each unit is a microcosm representing in itself the entire all-inclusive universe.

Whitehead should connect his organic creatures to the fourth great idea from the nineteeeth century, evolution. Material particles do not evolve as they blindly run. Organic creatures do evolve as they combine diverse elements to create new emergent properties.
These epochal occasions are the creatures. The reason for the temporal character of the actual world can now be given by reference to the creativity and the creatures.... Thus there is a transition of the creative action, and this transition exhibits itself, in the physical world, in the guise of routes of temporal succession...

An epochal occasion is a concretion. It is a mode in which diverse elements come together into a real unity. Apart from that concretion, these elements stand in mutual isolation. Thus an actual entity is the outcome of a creative synthesis, individual and passing...

Whitehead's concretion, later called concrescence, is emergent
Thus the epochal occasion, which is thus emergent, has in its own nature the other creatures under the aspect of these forms, and analogously it includes the forms under the aspect of these creatures. It is thus a definite limited creature, emergent in consequence of the limitations thus mutually imposed on each other by the elements.

Descartes has the great merit that he states facts which any philosophy must fit into its scheme. There are bits of matter, and there are minds. Both matter and mind have to be fitted into the metaphysical scheme. 
Here is Whitehead as a Berkeleyan idealist. To be is to be perceived
But Whitehead is wrong that the entities gain their individual character from their "routes" (in space time). It is from their creative interactions with all the other entities in their communities.
Now, according to the doctrine of this lecture, the most individual actual entity is a definite act of perceptivity. So matter and mind, which persist through a route of such occasions, must be relatively abstract; and they must gain their specific individualities from their respective routes. The character of a bit of matter must be something common to each occasion of its route; and analogously, the character of a mind must be something common to each occasion of its route. Each bit of matter, and each mind, is a subordinate community—in that sense analogous to the actual world...

VII. THE CREATIVE PROCESS

This account of what is meant by the enduring existence of matter and of mind explains such endurance as exemplifying the order immanent in the world...

Accordingly, any given instance of experience is only possible so far as the antecedent facts permit. For they are required in order to constitute it. The maintenance, throughout ages of life history, of a given type of experience, in instance after instance of its separate occasions, requires, therefore, the stable order of the actual world.

The creative process is thus to be discerned in that transition by which one occasion, already actual, enters into the birth of another instance of experienced value. There is not one simple line of transition from occasion to occasion, though there may be a dominant line...

The birth of a new instance is the passage into novelty. Consider how any one actual fact, which I will call the ground, can enter into the creative process.

Whitehead sees clearly that his creative process brings new information into the universe in the form of ideas, whether purely mental or embodied in material.
The novelty which enters into the derivate instance is the information of the actual world with a new set of ideal forms. In the most literal sense the lapse of time is the renovation of the world with ideas. A great philosopher (Samuel Alexander) has said that time is the mind of space. In respect to one particular new birth of one centre of experience, this novelty of ideal forms will be called the "consequent." 
Later Whitehead will say that multiple grounds, the antecedent facts of many prior occasions, will come together in one consequent.
Thus we are now considering the particular relevance of the consequent to the particular ground supplied by one antecedent occasion. The derivate includes the fusion of the particular ground with the consequent, so far as the consequent is graded by its relevance to that ground.

Later Whitehead will say that the actual and not actual that enter the process are possibilities
In this fusion of ground with consequent, the creative process brings together something which is actual and something which, at its entry into that process, is not actual. The process is the achievement of actuality by the ideal consequent, in virtue of its union with the actual ground. In the phrase of Aristotle, the process is the fusion of being with not-being.

In Whitehead's great work of 400 pages, Process and Reality, we can only sample his thinking, but there is a partial continuity in his jargon with his two previous books. A major novelty is his introduction of a Kantian/Hegelian architectonic of new categories, a single Category of the Ultimate, eight Categories of Existence, twenty-seven Categories of Explanation, and nine Categorial Obligations. He introduces his Categoreal Scheme by defining the four basic notions of the philosophy of organism - an 'actual entity,' that of a 'prehension,' that of a 'nexus,' and that of the 'ontological principle.' Whitehead finds clear antecedents of his thought in Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Kant, and Plato.

This chapter contains an anticipatory sketch of the primary notions which constitute the philosophy of organism. The whole of the subsequent discussion in these lectures has the purpose of rendering this summary intelligible, and of showing that it embodies generic notions inevitably presupposed in our reflective experience—presupposed, but rarely expressed in explicit distinction. Four notions may be singled out from this summary, by reason of the fact that they involve some divergence from antecedent philosophical thought. These notions are, that of an 'actual entity,' that of a 'prehension,' that of a 'nexus,' and that of the 'ontological principle.' Philosophical thought has made for itself difficulties by dealing exclusively in very abstract notions, such as those of mere awareness, mere private sensation, mere emotion, mere purpose, mere appearance, mere causation. These are the ghosts of the old 'faculties,' banished from psychology, but still haunting metaphysics. There can be no 'mere' togetherness of such abstractions. The result is that philosophical discussion is enmeshed in the fallacy of 'misplaced concreteness.'1 In the three notions— actual entity, prehension, nexus—an endeavour has been made to base philosophical thought upon the most concrete elements in our experience.
1 Cf. my Science and the Modern World, Ch. III.

'Actual entities'—also termed 'actual occasions'—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real. They differ among themselves: God is an actual entity, and so is the most trivial puff of existence in far-off empty space. But, though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.

The 'ontological principle' is that actual entities are ontological substances
In its recurrence to the notion of a plurality of actual entities the philosophy of organism is through and through Cartesian! The 'ontological principle' broadens and extends a general principle laid down by John Locke in his Essay (Bk. II, Ch. XXIII, Sect. 7), when he asserts that "power" is "a great part of our complex ideas of "substances." The notion of 'substance' is transformed into that of 'actual entity'; and the notion of 'power' is transformed into the principle that the reasons for things are always to be found in the composite nature of definite actual entities— in the nature of God for reasons of the highest absoluteness, and in the nature of definite temporal actual entities for reasons which refer to a particular environment. The ontological principle can be summarized as: no actual entity, then no reason.

Each actual entity is analysable in an indefinite number of ways. In some modes of analysis the component elements are more abstract than in other modes of analysis. The analysis of an actual entity into 'prehensions' is that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities. This mode of analysis will be termed the 'division' of the actual entity in question.

Prehensions have a vector character because they are causes, purposes, and values coming it to the actual entity from the past.
Each actual entity is 'divisible' in an indefinite number of ways, and each way of 'division' yields its definite quota of prehensions. A prehension reproduces in itself the general characteristics of an actual entity: it is referent to an external world, and in this sense will be said to have a 'vector character'; it involves emotion, and purpose, and valuation, and causation. In fact, any characteristic of an actual entity is reproduced in a prehension. It might have been a complete actuality; but, by reason of a certain incomplete partiality, a prehension is only a subordinate element in an actual entity. A reference to the complete actuality is required to give the reason why such a prehension is what it is in respect to its subjective form. This subjective form is determined by the subjective aim at further integration, so as to obtain the 'satisfaction' of the completed subject. In other words, final causation and atomism are interconnected philosophical principles.

With the purpose of obtaining a one-substance cosmology, 'prehensions' are a generalization from Descartes' mental 'cogitations,' and from Locke's 'ideas,' to express the most concrete mode of analysis applicable to every grade of individual actuality. Descartes and Locke maintained a two-substance ontology—Descartes explicitly, Locke by implication. Descartes, the mathematical physicist, emphasized his account of corporeal substance; and Locke, the physician and the sociologist, confined himself to an account of mental substance.

The philosophy of organism combines Locke's ideas and Cartesian cogitations (res cogitans), as well as Descartes' res extensa and Leibniz's monads
The philosophy of organism, in its scheme for one type of actual entities, adopts the view that Locke's account of mental substance embodies, in a very special form, a more penetrating philosophic description than does Descartes' account of corporeal substance. Nevertheless, Descartes' account must find its place in the philosophic scheme. On the whole, this is the moral to be drawn from the Monadology of Leibniz. His monads are best conceived as generalizations of contemporary notions of mentality. The contemporary notions of physical bodies only enter into his philosophy subordinately and derivatively. The philosophy of organism endeavours to hold the balance more evenly. But it does start with a generalization of Locke's account of mental operations.

Actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other. There are thus real individual facts of the togetherness of actual entities, which are real, individual, and particular, in the same sense in which actual entities and the prehensions are real, individual, and particular. Any such particular fact of togetherness among actual entities is called a 'nexus' (plural form is written 'nexūs'). The ultimate facts of immediate actual experience are actual entities, prehensions, and 'nexūs. All else is, for our experience, derivative abstraction.

The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, 'In no way.' The true philosophic question 2 is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?

Whitehead's Plato here seems to have absorbed the Aristotelean view that Plato's Forms are abstractions from, and 'participants in, the concrete facts?
In other words, philosophy is explanatory of abstraction, and not of concreteness. It is by reason of their instinctive grasp of this ultimate truth that, in spite of much association with arbitrary fancifulness and atavistic mysticism, types of Platonic philosophy retain their abiding appeal; they seek the forms in the facts. Each fact is more than its forms, and each form 'participates' throughout the world of facts. The definiteness of fact is due to its forms; but the individual fact is a creature, and creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures.
2 In this connection I may refer to the second chapter of my book The Principle of Relativity, Cambridge University Press,t 192


We can now visualize an actual occasion, showing how the many prehensions from past occasions come together in the "concrescence" to form one space-time event which then becomes just one of many past occasions that are in the light cone of a future occasion.

We can also compare this to Whitehead's relativistic space-time diagram from his April 14, 1925 Lowell Lecture.

Whitehead on Freedom and Creative Decisions
Whitehead says
The word 'decision' does not here imply conscious judgment, though in some 'decisions' consciousness will be a factor. The word is used in its root sense of a 'cutting off.' The ontological principle declares that every decision is referable to one or more actual entities, because in separation from actual entities there is nothing, merely nonentity—'The rest is silence.'

The ontological principle asserts the relativity of decision; whereby every decision expresses the relation of the actual thing, for which a decision is made, to an actual thing by which that decision is made. But 'decision' cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it. Thus the ontological principle is the first stage in constituting a theory embracing the notions of 'actual entity,' 'givenness,' and 'process.' Just as 'potentiality for process' is the meaning of the more general term 'entity,' or 'thing'; so 'decision' is the additional meaning imported by the word 'actual' into the phrase 'actual entity.' 'Actuality' is the decision amid 'potentiality.' It represents stubborn fact which cannot be evaded. The real internal constitution of an actual entity progressively constitutes a decision conditioning the creativity which transcends that actuality.

Whitehead's ninth Categoreal Obligation is the very important Category of Freedom and Determination, which he finds discussed in Locke and Immanuel Kant. Whitehead says

the concrescence of each individual actual entity is internally determined and externally free. This category can be condensed into the formula, that in each concrescence whatever is determinable is determined, but that there is always a remainder for the decision of the subject-superject of that concrescence.

This subject-superject is the universe in that synthesis, and beyond it there is nonentity. This final decision is the reaction of the unity of the whole to its own intemal determination. This reaction is the final modification of emotion, appreciation, and purpose. But the decision of the whole arises out of the determination of the parts, so as to be strictly relevant to it.

Isabelle Stengers analyzed Whitehead's idea of a "decision" in an actual occasion.

At the end of Part One of her Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers notes that an "actual occasion" contains multiple incoming prehensions from past occasions which Whitehead calls "alternative suggestions." These she identifies with William James's alternative possibilities, which is the basis of two-stage models of free will.

Stengers quotes this fragment from Science and the Modern World.

every actual occasion is set within a realm of alternative interconnected entities. This realm is disclosed by all the untrue propositions which can be predicated significantly of that occasion. It is the realm of alternative suggestions, whose foothold in actuality transcends each actual occasion. The real relevance of untrue propositions for each actual occasion is disclosed by art, romance, and by criticism in reference to ideals. It is the foundation of the metaphysical position which I am maintaining that the understanding of actuality requires a reference to ideality. The two realms are intrinsically inherent in the total metaphysical situation. The truth that some proposition respecting an actual occasion is untrue may express the vital truth as to the aesthetic achievement. It expresses the ‘great refusal’ which is its primary characteristic. An event is decisive in proportion to the importance (for it) of its untrue propositions:

Stengers' analysis contains echoes of the great existentialists' notions that any "decision" involves the "destruction" of some alternative possibilities condemning them to "non-being." For example, Jean-Paul Sartre's L'être et le néant.

Then Stengers homes in on James' notion of "doing otherwise as the essence of a free decision."

Sometimes, in the course of this text, I have been unable not to anticipate, and to use the word "decision," which Whitehead was to use in Process and Reality to name the "breaking off" that turns the occasion into the affirmation of a "thus and not otherwise." When he named the "great refusal," Whitehead himself could doubtless not help but be inhabited by a syntax that makes the occasion the producer of its limitation. No doubt he was aware, when writing Science and the Modern World, that his concept of an occasion was merely a first approximation. And perhaps the use of the word "decision," in Process and Reality, indicates that he has henceforth provided himself with the means to fully affirm the meaning William James conferred upon this term: that of a living moment that produces its own reasons.

Decisions, for him who makes them, are altogether peculiar psychic facts. Self-luminous and self-justifying at the living moment at which they occur, they appeal to no outside moment to put its stamp upon them or make them continuous with the rest of nature. Themselves it is rather who seem to make nature continuous; and in their strange and intense function of granting consent to one possibility and withholding it from another, to transform an equivocal and double future into an inalterable and simple past (DD, 158).

With James, Whitehead refused to make continuity primary; that is, he also refused to allow the occasion to be deduced from the whole. Every continuity is a result, a succession of resumptions that are so many "purposes," deciding the way the present will prolong the past, give a future to this past and make it "its" past. Yet the way James characterizes decision, "granting consent to one possibility and withholding it from another," could not be adopted as such, for it contains too many unknowns. It had to be constructed, in a way that enables every production of existence to be characterized as a decision. It is the actual occasions themselves that will affirm, no longer merely "just this, and no more," but "thus and not otherwise."

Continuity is the essential nature of field theories, with their infinite number of points on a line. Whitehead's atomicity of experience suggests he favors a particulate view of nature, with a finite number of actual entities?

In his Chapter X on Process, Whitehead again tells us that some of his most important concepts about process come from John Locke. The clear talk about Locke devolves into obscure Whitehead jargon.

[T]here are two kinds of fluency. One kind is the concrescence which, in Locke's language, is 'the real internal constitution of a particular existent.' The other kind is the transition from particular existent to particular existent. This transition, again in Locke's language, is the 'perpetually perishing' which is one aspect of the notion of time; and in another aspect the transition is the origination of the present in conformity with the 'power' of the past.

The phrase 'the real internal constitution of a particular existent,' the description of the human understanding as a process of reflection upon data, the phrase 'perpetually perishing,' and the word 'power' together with its elucidation are all to be found in Locke's Essay. Yet owing to the limited scope of his investigation Locke did not generalize or put his scattered ideas together. This implicit notion of the two kinds of flux finds further unconscious illustration in Hume. It is all but explicit in Kant, though—as I think—misdescribed. Finally, it is lost in the evolutionary monism of Hegel and of his derivative schools. With all his inconsistencies, Locke is the philosopher to whom it is most useful to recur, when we desire to make explicit the discovery of the two kinds of fluency, required for the description of the fluent world. One kind is the fluency inherent in the constitution of the particular existent. This kind I have called 'concrescence.' The other kind is the fluency whereby the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process. This kind I have called 'transition.' Concrescence moves towards its final cause, which is its subjective aim; transition is the vehicle of the efficient cause, which is the immortal past. The discussion of how the actual particular occasions become original elements for a new creation is termed the theory of objectification. The objectified particular occasions together have the unity of a datum for the creative concrescence. But in acquiring this measure of connection, their inherent presuppositions of each other eliminate certain elements in their constitutions, and elicit into relevance other elements. Thus objectification is an operation of mutually adjusted abstraction, or elimination, whereby the many occasions of the actual world become one complex datum. This fact of the elimination by reason of synthesis is sometimes termed the perspective of the actual world from the standpoint of that concrescence. Each actual occasion defines its own actual world from which it originates. No two occasions can have identical actual worlds.

The Function of Reason
In his 1929 book, Whitehead speculated about the ability of biological evolution to escape the destructive tendency of the second law of thermodynamics.
History discloses two main tendencies in the course of events. One tendency is exemplified in the slow decay of physical nature. With stealthy inevitableness, there is degradation of energy. The sources of activity sink downward and downward. Their very matter wastes. The other tendency is exemplified by the yearly renewal of nature in the spring, and by the upward course of biological evolution.
Whitehead here is asking the same question as his scientist colleague Arthur Stanley Eddington asked in his own Gifford Lectures of 1928, published as The Nature of the Physical World. This is our fundamental question of information philosophy, "How exactly has the universe escaped from the total disorder of thermodynamic equilibrium and produced a world full of information?" The answer is the cosmic creation process that Whitehead anticipated as "some general counter-agency."
The material universe has contained in itself, and perhaps still contains, some mysterious impulse for its energy to run upwards. This impulse is veiled from our observation, so far as concerns its general operation. But there must have been some epoch in which the dominant trend was the formation of protons, electrons, molecules, and stars. Today, so far as our observations go, they are decaying. We know more of the animal body, through the medium of our personal experience. In the animal body, we can observe the appetition towards the upward trend, with Reason as the selective agency. In the general physical universe we cannot obtain any direct knowledge of the corresponding agency by which it attained its present stage of available energy...

The universe, as construed solely in terms of the efficient causation of purely physical interconnections, presents a sheer, insoluble contradiction... The moral to be drawn from the general survey of the physical universe with its operations viewed in terms of purely physical laws, and neglected so far as they are inexpressible in such terms, is that we have omitted some general counter-agency.

Information philosophy has discovered Whitehead's "counter-agency as the cosmic creation process
This counter-agency in its operation throughout the physical universe is too vast and diffusive for our direct observation. We may acquire such power as the result of some advance. But at present, as we survey the physical cosmos, there is no direct intuition of the counter-agency to which it owes its possibility of existence as a wasting finite organism.

Whitehead hopes to discover some underlying "purpose," which he sees clearly present in biological evolution as "foresight" and "intention." He describes the function of "Reason" as the promotion of "the art of life." (p.4) And he says "At the lower end of the scale, it is hazardous to draw any sharp distinction between living things and inorganic matter." (p.5) This will open the way to his panpsychist view of a "mysterious impulse" behind energy.

Reason is the organ of emphasis upon novelty. It provides the judgment by which realization in idea obtains the emphasis by which it passes into realization in purpose, and thence its realization in fact. (ibid., p.20)

Provided that we admit the category of final causation, we can consistently define the primary function of Reason. This function is to constitute, emphasize, and criticize the final causes and strength of aims directed towards them. The pragmatic doctrine must accept this definition. It is obvious that pragmatism is nonsense apart from final causation. (ibid., p.26) )

Following Kant, Whitehead distinguishes between practical and speculative Reason, the latter being the systematic philosophy of the early Greeks.

the critical discovery which gave to the speculative Reason its supreme importance was made by the Greeks. Their discovery of mathematics and of logic introduced method into speculation. Reason was now armed with an objective test and with a method of progress. In this way Reason was freed from its sole dependence on mystic vision and fanciful suggestion. (ibid., p.40)

We can note in passing that Whitehead is not what Kant called an "onto-theologist," one who hopes to discover God by thinking about the concept of "Being," the "Boundless", the "Indeterminate," etc. Whitehead was what Kant called a "cosmo-theologist," one who tries to discern God through our experiences with the natural world.

Whitehead and Information Philosophy
There are some broad similarities between information philosophy and Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" or his oddly named "organic mechanism." To see the connection, we must sharpen the idea of Newtonian mechanism and even the deterministic motions of matter in special relativity. These both seem well-described by Whitehead's attack on "simple location."

Today we describe this as "reductionism," the mistaken idea that all phenomena are reducible to physics and chemistry, that biological organisms and even mental phenomena are reducible to the motions of their constituent material particles.

Reductionism claims that there are deterministic causal chains coming "bottom up" from matter. If there are "mental phenomena," they are merely "epiphenomena," giving us the illusion of mental events and "mental causation."

Whitehead thought relativity and quantum mechanics had added something new to mechanical materialism. He was wrong about relativity, but right about quantum physics, though he did not understand what it is that quantum phenomena add to biological organisms and mental processes. [Nor did he see] the importance of another physical process that his British colleague Arthur Stanley Eddington called attention to, the second law of thermodynamics, in his Gifford Lectures the same year as those of Whitehead.

Perhaps the greatest similarity between I-Phi and Process Philosophy is that they both claim to explain a "creative process," which lies behind the "emergence of "purpose" (the entelechy of Aristotle or the teleonomy of Colin Pittendrigh and Jacques Monod) in living things.

  • System: Both information and process philosophy are systematic philosophies, applying a small set of principles to everything from elementary particles to cosmology, and explaining evolution all the way from inert matter to living things.

  • Organism: Whitehead says he wanted to avoid a "bifurcation" between the organic and inorganic world.. But when he applies his ideas that describe mental events like perception, experience, valuations, etc. all the way down to material particles, he mistakenly introduces panpsychism. Whitehead simply describes the physical processes of matter in space and time using terms that are only appropriate for biological entities, like perception, decision, valuation, etc. He transforms an entirely material space-time "event" into an "occasion" with mental properties. But saying such a thing does not make it so, even if Whitehead says that God is overseeing the process..

    By contrast, the information philosophy emphasis on the creation of information structures distinguishes the creation of passive structures like the galaxies, stars, planets, even elementary material particles, from active information structures that communicate information among their parts and to and from other active structures to form a community of living things (something like Whitehead's "nexūs" or "societies").

    For information philosophy, an organism is a form through which matter and energy flow, and information processes manage those flows. For passive structures, the flows are controlled entirely by natural forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces.

    Like process philosophy, there is no "vitalism" in information philosophy. Nor is there any "telos" or pre-existing purpose. Thus cosmic evolution is purposeless, yet it contains the creation of information structures with negative entropy that can be intrpreted as a benevolent and even divine providence that supports all living things in the universe.

  • Experience: Process philosophy and information philosophy both stress the importance of experience. Where Whitehead describes experience as the "becoming" of an actual occasion, information philosophy shows how experiences are recorded and reproduced in organisms with minds, however primitive. Past experiences, played back in similar situations by our Experience Recorder and Reproducer (ERR), are guides for actions, both practical and moral.

    Recording experiences in minds - Whitehead's actual occasions - then storing their content as knowledge external to minds, is the basis for humanity's extraordinary growth of natural knowledge. Whitehead's processes tell us nothing about the creation of such value.

  • Valuation: Although Whitehead's category of conceptual valuation suggested that feelings in an actual occasion would register a valuation "up" or "down," like all attempts to identify an objective criterion of value since the Enlightenment, Whitehead offers no measure of value. Information philosophy identifies the preservation of information as a universal good, beyond traditional, religious, humanistic, or bioethical standards. Information structures are a cosmic good. The entropic dissipative processes of the second law of thermodynamics are evil incarnate.

  • Quantum Effects: Whitehead was familiar with quantum mechanics and argued that a quantum of time would help the "duration" for his actual occasion.

    Information philosophy claims that the indeterminacy in quantum events is important for the creation of new alternative possibilities.

  • Chance: Although his major writing was before Werner Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, Whitehead seems to accept chance as needed for evolution. He wrote "The doctrine of evolution has to do with the emergence of novel organisms as the outcome of chance." The ontological chance of quantum physics is essential for the creation of new information in the universe. This is the "novelty" in creativity that Whitehead described.
Quantum Whiteheadians
A number of scholars argue that Whitehead's panpsychism can explain some puzzling aspects of quantum mechanics, including Henry P. StappStuart HameroffUlrich MohrhoffHarald Atmanspacher, and Massimo Pauri, among many others.

---
Glossary of Key Terms used by Alfred North Whitehead

Also see our I-Phi glossary of terms related to problems of freedomvalue, and knowledge uses hyperlinks (with blue underlines) to provide recursive definitions from within each entry.

Hyperlinks go to relevant pages in the I-Phi website and to external sites such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, where available.

Click on the "Search I-Phi" link to find all the webpages on the I-Phi website that refer to the given term. And click on "I-Phi Page" to get a much more detailed description of the term.


A

Actual_Entity is initially Whitehead's term for the classic term "substance." Later it is mostly replaced by an Actual Occasion.

"'Actual entities' - also termed 'actual occasions' - are the final real things of which the world is made up...God is an actual entity."(PR18) "The term 'actual occasion will always exclude God from its scope." (PR88)

"The real internal constitution of an actual entity progressively constitutes a decision conditioning the creativity which transcends that actuality." (PR230)

"An actual occasion is a prehension of one infinite hierarchy (its associated hierarchy) together with various finite hirerarchies." (SMW 171).

Grasping an idea or concept with the intellect or as a cognitive act. Whitehead contrasts the term prehension, which he defines as the immediate grasping of perception without cognition or intellection.
Other glosses - Prehension
B   

C    

Concrescence is the growing together of many prehensions or grounds (both called ingressions) into one consequent.

"To be causa sui means that the process of concrescence is its own reason for the decision in respect to the qualitative clothing of feelings...The freedom inherent in the universe is constituted by this element of self-causation. (PR88)

"Locke is the philosopher to whom it is most useful to recur, when we desire to make explicit the discovery of the two kinds of fluency, required for the description of the fluent world. This kind I have called 'concrescence.' The other kind is the fluency the perishing of the process, on the completion of the particular existent, constitutes that existent as an original element in the constitutions of other particular existents elicited by repetitions of process. This kind I have called 'transition.' Concrescence moves towards its final cause, which is its subjective aim; transition is the vehicle of the efficient cause, which is the immortal past."

Creativity is the result of a Process, an Actual Occasion. It starts with one or more Prehensions or perceptions of the Many that Transition into the Concrescence of a new Unity, a One that Perishes as it forms a part of a new Many.

Creativity, the Many, and the One are the three parts of the "Category of the Ultimate."

D   

An Actual Occasion cannot be an infinitesimal moment in time if it is to be perceived and prehended. That notion of an atomic amount of time is the duration.

An Ideal Entity is an ideal or Abstract Form.

Other glosses - Actual OccasionDurationPrehension
E    

See Actual Entity.

An Ideal Entity is an ideal or Abstract Form.

Whitehead adapts the idea of a physical event, an infinitesimal point in relativistic space and time to his notion of what we Perceive or Prehend, which is a substantial volume in space and duration in time. In his later writing, these Events become his Actual Occasions.

An Eternal Object

An Eternal Object is an immaterial Form or Idea that exists outside of space and time. The Platonic Forms, logical truths, and the mathematical entities in his Principia Mathematica are Eternal Objects. They are pure potential that can be realized in an Actual Entity. All Objects can be Perceived and Felt by Subjects.

Whitehead talks of many kinds of Experience - Aesthetic, Higher and Lower, Immediate, and especially Religious Experience.
Before he turned to philosophy at Harvard, Whitehead had expanded the idea of a physical event at an infinitesimal point in space and time to something with more spatial extension and temporal duration, so events could overlap.
F    

G    

A Ground is one of the Many prior Actual Occasions as Prehensions as Ingressions in the Transition and Concrescence to a new Actual Occasion or Consequent One, which Perishes.
H    

I   

indetermination

To be Indeterminate is to say that at least some of the many properties of an Entity are unknown, perhaps unknowable.
Other glosses - Actual Entity
Ingression is how earlier Occasions and Eternal Objects enter into the Creativity and Concrescence, perishing in the Transition to a new Actual Occasion (the Consequent) .
K   

L    

M    

An Actual Occasion is a Microscopic process, larger and longer than the infinitesimal point in ordinary space-time, but much smaller than tables and chairs, for example.

Macroscopic processes are made up of multiple occasions in a Nexus or society of occasions

A Microscopic process of Concrescence is one that is not temporal. Here the "earlier" Prehensions are only logical, not actual, preconditions for the Occasion.

Other glosses - Actual OccasionNexus
N    

A Nexus is a complex of multiple Occasions. The Actual World consists of many Nexūs (plural).

What many philosophers call “actual entities,” Whitehead calls “nexūs.” This is most obvious in relation to philosophies that stay close to ordinary language and treat the objects of everyday experience as actual entities. Many process philosophers take Events as primary, though for Whitehead, most Events are Nexūs, multiple actual occasions.

Whitehead sometimes describes multiple Nexūs as Societies.

Other glosses - Actual Occasion
O    

Occasion is Whitehead's fundamental name for what goes on in a finite (or atomic) volume in space and a duration in time, not the infinitesimal point associated with an "event" in the Minkowski-Einstein "block universe," which Whitehead calls a "simple location."

An occasion may be something material happening in nature, or something mental happening in a mind.

Occasions function as Causes to its successor Occasions, which are affected by it as the Ingression of Prehensions.

Whitehead often describes occasions with other terms, such as Actual EntitiesCreaturesConcretions,

Whitehead's Ontological Principle is that only Actual Entities contribute causally to events. His "Eternal Objects" play no causal role because they are immaterial, e.g., the Platonic Forms. Information Philosophy shows how immaterial ideas in minds, a subset of communications in biology, in fact play a causal role in the world.

For Whitehead, every entity is considered to be an organism. This is a fundamental error. Organisms are biological entities. They maintain themselves against breakdown by the second law of thermodynamics, using negative entropy streams from the sun that flow through all earthly life. Organisms are creative, evolving according to the neo-Darwinian synthesis.

Organisms are Forms through which Matter and Energy continuously flow. And it is information communications and processing that controls those flows, using negative entropy that flows from the sun to all life.

Organic Mechanism is Whitehead's early term for what later is called Organism
Other glosses - Organism
For Whitehead, every entity is considered to be an organism. This is his fundamental error. Organisms are biological entities. They maintain themselves against breakdown by the second law of thermodynamics, using negative entropy streams from the sun that flow through all earthly life. Organisms are creative, evolving according to the neo-Darwinian synthesis.
Other glosses - Organic Mechanism

P  

Panpsychism is Whitehead's attempt to avoid a "bifurcation" between the organic and inorganic world.. But when he applies his ideas that describe mental events like perception, experience, valuations, etc. all the way down to material particles, he mistakenly introduces panpsychism, the idea that even the most elementary material particles also have minds.

Whitehead describes the physical processes of matter in space and time using terms that are only appropriate for biological entities, like perception, decision, valuation, etc. He transforms an entirely material space-time "event" into an "occasion" with mental properties. But saying such a thing does not make it so, even if Whitehead says that God is overseeing the process.

By contrast, the information philosophy emphasis on the creation of information structures distinguishes the creation of passive structures like the galaxies, stars, planets, even elementary material particles, from active information structures that communicate information among their parts and to and from other active structures to form a community of living things (something like Whitehead's "nexūs" or "societies").

For information philosophy, an organism is a form through which matter and energy flow, and information processes manage those flows. For passive information structures like elementary particles, as well as the galaxies, stars, and planets, matter and energy flows are controlled entirely by natural forces like gravity, electromagnetism, and nuclear forces.

Prehension is a non-cognitive version of an Apprehension. It is the immediate "grasping" or perception (e.g., a Humean "impression") of an idea before the mental mediation in terms of concepts.

Physical prehensions are perceptions of actual entities or actual occasions. Conceptual prehensions are "ingressions" of eternal objects.

Prehensions are the first stage (the Many Grounds) which grow together in the Concrescence that results in a Consequent One

Whitehead's Process puts the emphasis on things happening (Actual Occasions) that are far more than the Simple Locations and Paths of material particles in the universe.
Q   

R   

S  

Satisfaction suggests that the Actual Occasion has feelings following the Concrescence (the Consequent), even if it is a purely material event.

"The actual entity terminates its becoming in one complex feeling involving a completely determinate bond with every item of the universe, the bond being either a positive or a negative prehension." (PR71) The 'satisfaction' is the 'superject' of rather than the 'substance' or the 'subject.' (PR227)

Other glosses - Actual OccasionConcrescenceConsequent, a href="#Superject">Superject
Simple Location is the path in space and time of a bit of matter, but that neglects its relations with all the other bits of matter and other Actual Occasions in a Process. The standard theory of relativity regards the path of a particle as a succession of events. Whitehead's relativity includes the relations with every other event in the universe.
Other glosses - Actual OccasionProcess
For Whitehead, Subjects Perceive or Prehend Objects, including themselves as Subjects, as Actual Occasions, as Experiences. In an Ideal World, Objects only exist for Subjects. Subjects exist for themselves.
Although Whitehead often views an Actual Occasion as a Subject, he sometimes describes the Occasion as the Superject of its Prehensions.

"An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding over its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality." (PR71)

T    

Transition is still another term for a Macroscopic process, which involves the temporal “transition” from earlier Prehensions Occasions, functioning as Causes to its successors, which are affected by it.

By comparison, there is no temporal Transition in Microscopic process of Concrescence. Here the "earlier" Prehensions are only logical preconditions for the Occasion, viz. Eternal Objects

U   

V  

Every Actual Occasion is a Creation, and a Valuation

W    

X  

Y 

Z  

References
John B. Cobb, Jr's Whitehead Word Book, Randall Auxier's Glossary for Religion in the Making 1996, Donald Sherburne's Glossary for his Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality.

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