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First, Whitehead sees both human experiences and the quanta of energy discerned through the analysis of atoms as instances of one and the same metaphysical type. Both are events or occurrences. Whitehead calls them "actual occasions." There are great differences between them, but both exemplify a common basic structure.

Second, this common basic structure is that of the many becoming one. It is a process of concrescence, that is, a process in which a new concrete actuality emerges from the diverse actual occasions that make up its world. But stating matters in this abstract way will not help you much to understand this quite radical point.

Let us think instead about how a moment of human experience comes into being. It grows in large part out of antecedent experiences. For example, as one listens to the last note in a phrase of music, the hearing of the preceding notes still reverberates. Otherwise, one would not hear the phrase at all. That means that the earlier experiences are still present in the later one. They comprise much of the content of that later experience. But, of course, they don't exhaust it. There is a new note sounding in the new experience. That means that mediated through the air and through the nervous system, events in the external world, perhaps someone playing a piano in the room, also become part of the new experience.

Although these may be the dominant parts of the world of the new occasion of experience, they do not exhaust it. Usually there are visual and tactile elements in the experience as well. There are memories of earlier events and anticipations of future ones. The condition of the liver and the kidneys has its effect on the experience as well. And, through these and other aspects of the immediate environment, more remote influences are also at work. Thus the whole world flows into the present, to a large extent making it what it is.

What is most important to grasp here is that there is not first an occasion of experience that then relates to its past. Instead, the occasion only comes into being as these past events inform it. The new event includes the past events, and it has no existence at all apart from this inclusion.

Of course, not every feature of all those past events is included. On the contrary, most of what has happened in the past is lost. Even when we are dealing with the immediately preceding moment, we realize that what is still alive now is less than its totality. With respect to more remote events, most of the richness is lost.

The activity of concrescence is not simply the inclusion of aspects of the past. There is also supplementation. In our example of listening to the final note in a musical phrase, there is not simply the numerical adding of the notes to make up the phrase. The moment in which the final note is heard is one in which the phrase as a whole attains a unity and completeness that was not present in any of the antecedent moments or in the final note taken by itself. Each occasion of experience not only receives from the past. It also interprets the past and evaluates the past. It relates elements of the past to one another in creative ways. In this process there is a transcending of the past and a determination of just how that past will be integrated and transmitted to the future. Whitehead calls this a decision. Each occasion of human experience makes a decision about itself in view of the past that it includes and the future that it anticipates.

This is an example of how the many become one. I have said that every actual occasion, including quanta of energy, are also examples of many becoming one. Obviously they are not listening to music. But they are also ways in which their worlds express themselves creatively in new happenings. The formal pattern is the same, although the qualitative character is extremely different. This means that even a quantum of energy is, for Whitehead, an occasion of experience. That is, it is a way in which the world is actively appropriated at a particular locus in space time. Of course, this does not mean that quanta have sense experience or consciousness, but even in human beings, these are not fundamental. One is never conscious of more than a tiny part of the whole of one's experience.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead and Anthropology

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Whitehead's project to find, in occasions of human experience, patterns or structures that can be generalized, presupposes and implies the view that human beings are wholly, and without remainder, part of the natural world. Perhaps many people would verbally agree. But if one studies the anthropologies that have appeared in the various disciplines, one finds that this agreement has little affect on what transpires. The categories in which the human condition is discussed are quite different from those that function when other topics are in view. Even the human body is usually largely invisible in the discussion of human phenomena. Most discussions of psychology ignore physiology, and most discussions of physiology ignore psychology. Most discussions of economics ignore the actual character of physical reality, and most discussions in the physical sciences ignore the existence of human beings and their impact in the physical world. The divide is very deep indeed.

This is particularly surprising in a Darwinian age. Most of the practitioners of most of these disciplines acknowledge that human beings have evolved from prehuman ancestors. Most of them deny that there was a radical break at any point. Yet this acknowledgment has no effect on their intellectual and scholarly activities.

There are exceptions. For example, some scientists do attempt to throw light on human behavior through the study of other creatures. Recently some of these, calling themselves sociobiologists, have attracted considerable attention. But, on the whole, their approach reinforces the resistance to the practical acknowledgment of continuity by others. It follows the old pattern of a discredited scientism in being reductionistic. Many students of humanity are willing for reductionism to have its way in the rest of the world, but most are determined to adopt a quite different approach in the study of human beings.

Basically, the old choices of dualism, materialism, and idealism still hold sway in practice, even when they are eschewed in theory. In the organization of knowledge in general, dualism is dominant. In the study of human beings the practical attitude is that of idealism, namely, that the physical sciences ultimately tell us nothing about the way the human world really is. Hence they can be safely ignored. In the natural sciences the practical attitude is reductive materialism. In this context, to be serious about locating human beings within nature, without any tincture of reductionism, is a quite distinctive project, even if the effort is not unique to Whitehead.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead and Anthropology

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John B. Cobb, Jr., The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne

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The idea of truth has had difficulty in recent philosophy. Traditionally truth has been understood as the correspondence to reality of what is said or written or thought. However, much philosophy now lacks the idea of an independent reality to which language or thought could correspond. Even if such a reality exists, there seems, to many philosophers, to be no way to know it. If we are blankly ignorant with regard to reality, it would be meaningless to declare that a statement about it is true or false. And finally, language and thought are not the sorts of things that could correspond with a reality that is not constituted of language or thought.

Reflection of this sort has led many of those who still want to speak of “truth” to turn to coherence views of truth. An idea will be accepted as true if it coheres with other well-accepted ideas that have stood the test of time. Others offer pragmatic views of truth. One accepts an idea as true if the consequences of accepting it are positive. I will believe there is truly a gap in the wall at a certain point if, when guided by that belief, I succeed in walking through the wall.

Whitehead recognizes the importance of coherence and of pragmatic results in the effort to determine what is true. However, his definition of truth returns to correspondence. As we have seen he believes that we live in a real world composed of actual occasions. Accordingly, the first objection listed above carries no weight. He believes that we prehend these actual occasions; so the second objection is not an obstacle. However, he agrees that language and thought are not the sorts of things that can correspond to this real world.

For this reason it is very important to recall that a proposition, for Whitehead, is not a species of language. Language usually calls attention to propositions, but there is never a one-to-one correspondence between language and any particular proposition. A proposition is the way some actual occasion or nexus of actual occasions may be. If the actual occasion in fact exists in just that way, then the proposition is true. The correspondence is not between language or thought and reality; it is between how something may be and how it is.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead Word Book

#john b. cobb #alfred north whitehead

For several centuries Western science has undertaken to exclude teleology, that is, any form of purpose, from nature. As nature has been extended, especially through evolutionary theory, to include human beings, there is a tendency to devalue or even deny purposiveness in human experience as well. Explanation should be exclusively in terms of efficient causation or the subsumption of particular events under general laws. This has proved an important corrective of the easy teleological explanations with which thinkers sometimes rested content in the Middle Ages.

Whitehead shared the common view of the great importance of efficient causes or what he called “causal efficacy.” He was convinced that only actual entities exercise causal efficacy. They are the only “reasons.” In other words, the content and form of any occasion is explained by actual entities. Any explanation that falls short of showing which actual entities have caused an occasion to have the form it has, has not completed its task. To say we have a heart in order to pump blood through the body fails to provide the reason for the existence and functioning of the heart.

Nevertheless, Whitehead believed that modern thought has gone too far in its rejection of teleology. For Whitehead, all experience is purposive. Each occasion “aims” at achieving some value. Indeed it aims both at realizing some value in and of itself and also at contributing some value to future occasions. Every occasion has this “subjective aim.”

The aim of an occasion is not at value in general, but at some particular realization of value that is possible in that situation. …

Needless to say, the aim of most occasions is completely unconscious. Even in conscious occasions, the aim is generally not consciously in view. Nevertheless, it influences the whole process of concresecence.

All occasions have some indeterminacy in their origins. Their actual worlds do not fully settle what they will become. Their conceptual feelings can include reverted ones that thus introduce alternatives. They can “value up” and “value down” parts of what they inherit. How they deal with what is indeterminate is affected by the aim.

However, the occasion completes itself as something entirely determinate. This involves cutting off all possibilities except one. This is its “decision.” This decision is its own. It is not determined by past occasions or by God. Accordingly, the ontological principle that every reason for what an occasion becomes is found in some actual entity does not deny that each occasion also includes an element of self-determination. Whitehead uses the Latin phrase “causa sui” to express this idea. Every occasion is in part causa sui. The decision of an occasion is its own act, and along with the decisions of all previous occasions and of God, it explains why the occasion is what it is.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead Word Book

#john b. cobb

… Eternal objects are pure potentials, and that means forms that could in principle characterize something actual, but that are in their nature indifferent to whether they do, or ever will, characterize anything actual.

It is well to ask why Whitehead invented the term “eternal object” instead of sticking with the more familiar language of potentials and forms. First, “objects” establishes their status as depending on subjects. Objects exist only for subjects. They can be felt; they cannot feel. In themselves they cannot act. They are, indeed, passive.

We might suppose that all this would be heard in a word like “form,” but the history of philosophy warns us that this is not so. The Greeks thought extensively about form and matter. They thought everything actual could be understood as formed matter. But in their understanding, “matter” was passive. Acting was a function of form rather than matter. Plato, therefore, attributed an extremely important role to forms.

Further, most of the discussion of forms was of the forms of actual things and norms. Forms were used for classifying, and there was a sense that there were objectively real types of things, just as there were real norms identified by value-laden words. Whitehead wanted a label that would not carry any of these connotations. Qua objects, no one form is preferable to any other form. No one classificatory system is better than another. There are hierarchies of forms in terms of complexity, but not in terms of value.

…

… It is true that every pattern that is exemplified in every symphony that has ever been written or performed has always existed as an eternal object. Indeed, since no symphony is ever exactly the same in two performances, we must say that there is a slightly different pattern ingredient in every performance, and since no two listeners will hear it in exactly the same way, there is a slightly different pattern for every hearer and on each occasion of hearing. But these are only patterns. As patterns they have no different status from trillions of other patterns until they are selected by Mozart and the orchestras that actualize the music.

In any case, as eternal objects they are not patterns of sound. The sound does not exist until it is heard. Even God cannot hear it until God can share the hearing with creatures. Similarly, God had no visual experience until there were creaturely eyes.

The choice of the term “eternal” may have been unfortunate. For many people it has a religious, or at least an honorific, connotation. Under the influence of Plato, it was long thought that things that are eternal are somehow superior to things that are temporal. But for Whitehead all value is located in actuality and all actuality is temporal or, in God’s case, derivative from what is temporal.

For Whitehead “eternal” means nothing more than nontemporal. That is another way of saying that “eternal” objects have no actuality at all in themselves. They do not come into being and they do not pass away. They are related to every temporal moment in the same way, so far as their own nature is concerned.

John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead Word Book

#john b. cobb #alfred north whitehead #eternal objects

Actual occasions can be analyzed coordinately into their prehensions or genetically into the phases of concrescence. But they cannot be physically divided into these or any other parts. This means that what is actual is not a continuum. It is composed of actual occasions each of which has definite extension.

Nevertheless, these are “extensively connected.” These extensive connections are not actualities, but they are potentialities realized by the actual occasions. These potentialities are not atomic in the way the actual occasions that realize them are. On the contrary they constitute a continuum. This is the extensive continuum. The existence of the extensive continuum depends on the existence of the actual occasions, but given their actuality, the extensive continuum constitutes a restriction on all future occasions as well. They must exist in extensive connection to the present and past occasions and to one another.

The world we know is four-dimensional. However, this form of dimensionality is a contingent feature. Perhaps dimensionality as such is contingent. What is necessary to the extensive continuum is only that all occasions be extensively related.

This necessity of extensive relations implies also that the continuum can be analyzed into regions each of which has the characteristic of extensiveness and extensive relatedness to all other regions. Since we are dealing with a continuum no one division is more appropriate than any other. However, in point of fact, the actual occasions actualize the continuum in particular ways. Each has its “standpoint” within it. Many characteristics of an actual occasion depend upon its regional standpoint. For example, this standpoint determines just which occasions it prehends. The extensive continuum as such is not affected by the presence or absence of actual occasions.

Past, present, and future are not characteristics of the extensive continuum as such. They are defined in terms of prehensive relationships. The “past” of any occasion is everything that has causal efficacy for it. The “future” is constituted by those occasions that will be causally affected by it. The “contemporary” world is made up of all the occasions that are neither causally effective in the occasion in question nor causally affected by it. That is, contemporaries are occasions that do not affect one another. Thus temporal characteristics belong to actual occasions as a result of their prehensions and are not an independent feature of the extensive continuum.

Geometry is the study of regions. The relation of these regions to those actualized by occasions does not enter into geometry. But whatever is learned about such regions by geometry applies to the regional standpoints of actual occasions and, therefore, to the occasions themselves. In Part Four of Process and Reality, Whitehead develops the principles of geometry out of his study of the relation of regions. …

John B. Cobb, Jr., Whitehead Word Book

#john b. cobb #alfred north whitehead