Process Philosophy
from 1929
There are no enduring things, only events. What looks like a stone persisting is a pattern of happenings holding its shape.
- Active
- from 1929
- Where
- Harvard, then Claremont
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Anglo American
The claim
The basic units of reality are actual occasions of experience — momentary events that arise, take account of everything before them, achieve a determinate character, and perish. Substance is an abstraction from process.
What it held
Whitehead spent his first career on mathematics and logic, co-writing Principia Mathematica with Russell, and moved to Harvard at sixty-three to do metaphysics. Process and Reality is the result and it is one of the strangest major books in English philosophy.
The argument starts from what he calls the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: taking an abstraction for the concrete reality it was abstracted from. Enduring substances are the main offender. Physics had already replaced them with fields and events; philosophy had not caught up.
An actual occasion prehends — takes account of — the occasions before it, integrates them into a determinate outcome, and then perishes, becoming data for what follows. Time is not a container; it is the succession of these achievements. Every occasion has some element of experience, however faint, which is panexperientialism rather than panpsychism, and he argues for it rather than assuming it.
God, in his scheme, is not an exception to the metaphysics but its chief exemplification — persuading rather than coercing, and affected by what happens.
How it argued
Speculative construction: build a scheme of general ideas, then test it against the widest possible range of experience — aesthetic, moral, religious and scientific alike.
What it was arguing against
Substance metaphysics, mind-matter dualism, and the assumption that the concepts of seventeenth-century physics can carry a metaphysics.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the technical vocabulary earns its difficulty. Whether panexperientialism is a solution to the mind-body problem or a restatement of it.
Common misconceptions
That it is theology. Whitehead was not religious in any conventional sense and the metaphysics stands without the chapter on God, which is where most of the later theological interest is concentrated.
How it began
A mathematician who had watched relativity and quantum theory dismantle the classical picture and concluded that philosophy's categories were a century out of date.
What became of it
Living, with a small dedicated community, and a much larger indirect presence in ecological and theological thought.
Lasting influence
Process theology entirely. Ecological philosophy. Deleuze read him seriously, and the recent revival owes something to that.
Why it still matters
Ontologies of events rather than objects are being taken seriously again in metaphysics and in philosophy of biology, where organisms look more like processes than things.
Put another way
A waterfall, which keeps its shape and is never made of the same water.
Where to start
Science and the Modern World. Process and Reality is not a book to start with.
The surprising bit
He wrote Principia Mathematica, one of the most rigorous books ever produced, and then a metaphysics so idiosyncratic in vocabulary that readers need a glossary. The same man did both.
In their own words
The safest general characterisation of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.
The elucidation of immediate experience is the sole justification for any thought.
Connections
- Answers
- Classical Pragmatism
- Opposed by
- Logical Atomism
- Influenced
- Process Theology
- Parallel to
- Madhyamaka Buddhism
The verdict
The most ambitious metaphysics written in English in the twentieth century, and the least read.