What becomes actual?

Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 02 · How an occasion becomes

Imagine pouring tea into a blue cup. The handle warms under your fingers; later, you leave the cold tea beside an unfinished letter. Through all these changes you speak of the same cup, and it seems natural to begin with a thing and then ask what happens to it.

Whitehead asks whether that familiar order of explanation reaches the most basic realities. Perhaps an enduring thing has to be explained through the connected happenings that sustain it. Perhaps becoming belongs to what an actuality is, rather than happening to it afterward.

The previous lesson asked us to keep a description’s task apart from a claim to completeness. The familiar description of a cup may serve perfectly well while leaving its endurance unexplained, and that gap is where Whitehead’s proposal begins. This everyday scene is not an observation of ultimate constituents: in his account, pouring tea, feeling warmth and writing a letter all involve many occasions.

Three distinctions will guide us: an occasion is not an enduring thing, experience need not be conscious, and creativity is not a separate agent that produces things. We will also introduce prehension, the relation through which an occasion takes account of its world; its fuller explanation belongs to the next lesson.

From enduring things to occasions

An actual occasion is a particular act of becoming in which inherited conditions acquire a new, definite unity, and how it becomes constitutes what it is. Whitehead asks us to give up the picture of a fully formed individual to which experiences are later added: the individual itself takes shape through the process. [1]

The occasion is complex: it can be analyzed through the ways other realities enter into its becoming. But those ways are aspects of one becoming, not a collection of little subjects, each completed on its own. To call an occasion basic is to say that no account of something more actual hiding underneath it can replace this concrete actuality.

An ordinary cup belongs at a different level of explanation. It persists through connected processes, keeping enough organization to be used, recognized and washed. For Whitehead, such persistence depends on occasions being related through what they contribute to further becoming, and a nexus is a particular group of actualities united by these concrete relations. How such relations sustain a pattern is the work of the later lesson on enduring things. For now, distinguish the thing that lasts from the occasions through which it lasts. [1] [2]

None of this makes the cup imaginary. It challenges the assumption that a thing which lasts must be the ultimate kind of actuality. Nor does it turn the whole cup into one subject: a connected group of occasions need not have a single experience that belongs to the group as a whole.

We cannot find an occasion simply by shortening the description of an everyday event. A brief sensation of warmth, a neuron firing, a musical phrase or a measured particle event does not come labeled as exactly one metaphysical occasion, and duration alone supplies no criterion. Such familiar events may help us ask about dependence and becoming, but they do not establish where one occasion begins or ends.

Whitehead’s names need one qualification. Actual entity is the broader term, covering God as well as the temporal actualities called actual occasions. Whitehead sometimes introduces the two expressions together, and his usage is not uniform, but we will keep the distinction: God is not another perishing occasion in the temporal succession, and that difference will need a fuller account later. [5]

Becoming, changing and perishing

If reality consists of becoming, why does Whitehead insist that an actual occasion does not change? The answer lies in a distinction between what becomes definite within an occasion and what differs from one occasion to another. [2]

The cup warms and cools, and we compare what an enduring thing is like at different times. In Whitehead’s account, this involves a connected succession of occasions, with differences between what is achieved in one and what is achieved in another. No single occasion remains underneath these differences, taking on one new state after another.

An occasion’s becoming is its own achievement of definiteness. Once that becoming is complete, no further, undecided version of the same occasion is waiting to take shape; further becoming belongs to other occasions. The earlier occurrence can matter to them, but it cannot go back to being undecided about what it became. Change in an enduring thing, then, concerns differences across related occasions, while becoming concerns the constitution of each occasion.

Whitehead calls the passing of an occasion’s own immediate experiencing its perishing. What perishing leaves is a definite occurrence that can condition further becoming. Its causal importance can continue even though its own experiencing does not go on as the same subject’s next experience. Being past, in other words, is not the same as being erased.

This account does not picture the creative advance as a row of universal instants through which the whole world marches; Whitehead rejects that picture. Nor can we discover the internal constitution of an occasion merely by cutting a stretch of clock time into shorter intervals. For now, keep the constitution of one actuality distinct from the temporal relations among actualities. Later lessons examine how the two belong together. [2]

Experience without consciousness?

Whitehead describes these fundamental actualities as experiential. That is a stronger claim than saying that things interact, and it uses experience more broadly than our usual talk of what someone notices, thinks or remembers. In his scheme, consciousness is a developed possibility of experience, not a condition that every experience must meet. [1] [3]

The proposal starts from a difference between describing an actuality’s effects on other things and considering how the given world matters within the actuality’s own becoming. Whitehead calls the second experiential: what is received acquires a particular felt importance in the constitution of this subject. That importance need not be noticed, thought about or judged good. He is claiming that actuality has an immediate side, beyond what is available to an observer’s description, and this is precisely the claim a critic can challenge.

Elizabeth Kraus describes the imaginative work this language asks of us. We take terms familiar from conscious life, keep a more general feature and remove whatever requires consciousness. Feeling keeps the appropriation of something given; satisfaction keeps achieved definiteness, without the pleasure the everyday word might suggest. The difficulty is to say what these broader meanings positively explain, and listing the associations we have removed cannot do that work. [3]

Here the previous lesson’s method applies directly. We start from experience we know and try to formulate a wider account, and the move needs an argument: the fact that we experience cannot, by itself, establish that every ultimate actuality has an experiential nature. Neither a cup nor the table beneath it has been shown to think.

C. Robert Mesle’s introduction makes the proposal more accessible by contrasting events of experience with enduring things. His comparisons with quantum events, however, should not be treated as experimental evidence for the metaphysics. Nor does understanding Whitehead require accepting Mesle’s broad claim that materialism denies experience: a physicalist, who holds that experience belongs entirely to physical reality, can accept that conscious experience occurs while disputing what explains it. [6]

The course lesson “What would explain conscious experience?” offers an optional comparison. It distinguishes explaining capacities such as discrimination and reporting from explaining experience, and asks what follows from that distinction. Whitehead’s wider use of experience is a different proposal, and learning his vocabulary supplies no missing proof in that contemporary dispute.

A relation that helps constitute the subject

Prehension is Whitehead’s name for a way in which something is taken account of in an occasion’s becoming. What is encountered and how it enters the becoming belong together, and the subject that results is constituted through such relations; it is not a completed observer standing outside them. [1] [3]

Return to the cold tea and the unfinished letter. If you have found a way to apologize, the letter may bring relief; if you are still avoiding what needs to be said, it may bring unease. What enters experience enters in a manner that helps give that experience its character, while the past remains settled either way. This human comparison involves many occasions and displays no individual one, and Whitehead also applies prehension where there is no conscious remembering.

Ordinary grammar can hide the change Whitehead is proposing. “The subject takes account of its world” sounds as if a finished subject first exists and then performs an action. For him, the taking-account is part of what makes the subject this subject. Yet the subject remains a particular unity, not an arbitrary list of influences.

Two names now mark aspects of the same actuality: subject for its own experiencing, and superject for the achieved outcome available to further experience. Keep them together. Whitehead’s subject is constituted through its experiences, and what it achieves matters beyond that experiencing. The next lesson develops this connection through what is given and the manner of its reception. [2]

What creativity names

The diversity that enters an occasion acquires a new unity. That unity is a new actuality, distinct from the actualities on which it depends, and it becomes available to further becoming. The many are not swallowed into a single final reality; a new one is added to what there is. Whitehead calls this general character of becoming creativity. [4]

Creativity is not an additional being that assembles occasions. Suppose we explained the cup’s warming by naming a hidden agent, Creativity, that produces the changes. We would have introduced something Whitehead’s term does not name, and the particular events would remain unexplained. His question concerns the general character those events exemplify, not the activity of an extra maker behind them.

The same point separates creativity from God. Whitehead assigns God a particular role within his account, whereas creativity names the general advance into new actuality; treating the two words as synonyms would hide that difference.

Nor does novelty guarantee improvement: a new actuality can perpetuate a limiting pattern. The word creative promises neither a work of art nor a morally better world. The newness here is, first of all, the occurrence of a distinct actuality, even when much of its character is inherited. The richer question of how an occasion can achieve a novel form comes later.

Two further ideas prepare that question. Eternal objects are potentials for definiteness: ways something could be determinate, considered apart from a particular occurrence. A particular shade of blue, considered as a possible character, differs from this cup’s actual history, and it also differs from your act of imagining a blue cup. Imagining that shade on a cup does not establish that an actual cup has it. [7]

Once possibilities are distinguished from actual occurrences, another question opens: why does this possibility matter here? Whitehead attributes the ordered relevance of possibilities to God’s valuation, which gives God an explanatory role different from that of creativity. Lesson 04 reconstructs the argument for needing such a source, and lesson 09 returns to what else the account asks of God. For now, the role is a proposal to examine. [7]

Has anything been explained?

A critic can understand all these distinctions and still ask why experiential language should extend beyond consciousness. Once thought, awareness and sensory appearance are removed, what warrants keeping the word experience? Does the claim reveal something about actuality, or does it give an unfamiliar name to causal interaction?

A Whiteheadian answer points to what the account is trying to connect. If experience belongs to basic actuality, conscious experience can be a developed form of a more general activity, rather than something that must arise from wholly nonexperiential constituents. The proposal also makes receiving a world part of an individual’s constitution. These are reasons to investigate the scheme, not a demonstration that it succeeds.

A critic can grant the importance of constitutive relations and still deny that they must be experiential, since explaining how a process depends on its surroundings does not yet establish the immediate subjectivity Whitehead attributes to it. A further problem follows. If generalized experience has so little specified content that any interaction qualifies, the theory may have renamed the relation and left the original explanatory task untouched.

The defender therefore owes an account of what felt importance contributes, and of how the scheme connects it with the developed consciousness we know. The critic, in turn, should assess that account rather than refute the easier claim that cups think. Understanding a proposal is what lets us locate what still needs defending, and the opening lesson’s standards remain in force: an intelligible application can support a scheme without establishing its adequacy or necessity.

Try four descriptions of the cup

Return to the morning with the blue cup and consider four descriptions:

1. The same cup persists through being filled, cooling and being washed.
2. A particular shade of blue is considered as a possible character, apart from whether anything has it.
3. A graph records the tea’s falling temperature while leaving its other features aside.
4. In Whitehead’s proposed account, one basic actuality inherits conditions, achieves its own definiteness and becomes a condition for further becoming.

Identify the focus of each description: an enduring process, a possibility, an abstract record or an occasion. Explain each choice by saying what the description lets us understand and what it leaves open. A reader adds: “The graph has many points. Each point must represent exactly one actual occasion, so we have measured them.” Give a corrected account, with a reason for the correction. Understanding the distinctions and criticizing their use matter more than remembering the labels.

A possible response

The first description concerns an enduring thing across a connected process. Calling it the same cup is useful and need not be false; Whitehead’s further question is what sustains that continuity. The cup’s persistence does not establish that one ultimate subject survives through all the changes, and its unity as a usable object does not show that it has a unified experience of its own.

The second concerns a possibility and sets aside particular instantiations of the shade, that is, the particular things that have it. Considering the shade is itself an actual occurrence in a human life, but what is being considered is the possible character. Confusing the act with its object would turn a distinction between levels of explanation into the claim that imagination makes a blue thing exist.

The third focuses on an abstract record: selected information about temperature and time as the tea cools. All four sentences are descriptions and all use abstraction, but this one is explicitly about a selective representation, and its selectivity need not make the record false. The fourth describes the role of an occasion within Whitehead’s theory without identifying which observed event fulfills it. An account of a cup across a morning and an account of one fundamental becoming therefore belong to different levels of explanation.

The reader’s claim needs correcting. If Whitehead’s account is accepted, the plotted points represent selected measurements of a process involving many occasions; the graph does not measure the occasions themselves. A sampling interval or a coordinate belongs to the representation, and neither establishes a unit of metaphysical becoming. Doubling the number of plotted measurements could improve the record of cooling without showing that twice as many occasions occurred. Connecting measurements to the proposed units would take a further argument.

A strong response can grant the distinctions and still challenge the theory, for example by asking why the actuality in the fourth description should be understood as experiential. That asks for a reason for a substantive claim. Finding a place for four descriptions does not, by itself, prove that Whitehead’s account of ultimate actuality is correct.

What the new occasion inherits

The blue cup is still a familiar thing, but Whitehead has changed the philosophical question we ask of it: its endurance is now something to explain. An occasion, meanwhile, acquires its definite character through relations, rather than first existing in isolation and later making contact with a world.

That leaves a difficulty worth following: how can what is past help constitute a new experience without making the two the same actuality? The next lesson takes up that question through prehension and causal inheritance.

Sources and limits

[1] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (1929), corrected edition edited by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (Free Press, 1978; supplied EPUB identifying the first Free Press paperback edition, 1985), I.II §§I–II (Part I, chapter II, sections I–II), M27–39. These sections introduce actual entities, prehensions, nexūs (the plural of nexus) and the principle that becoming constitutes being. M refers to the original Macmillan pages, retained in brackets; it is not the corrected edition’s printed pagination. The complete I.II and I.III, M27–54, were read with their five author notes and the relevant editorial notes. The lesson paraphrases selected claims from them rather than expounding the complete category lists.

[2] Whitehead, I.II §§III–IV, M39–45, and I.III §§II–III, M50–54, for subjective unity, subject and superject, becoming and perishing, and persistence across related occasions. I.III §II distinguishes societies from the narrower technical meaning of an enduring object with personal order. This lesson uses familiar enduring things as orientation, and the later account must preserve that finer distinction. The source’s physical conjectures are not treated as established contemporary science.

[3] Whitehead, I.III §IV, M54, and Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, supplied second edition (Fordham University Press, 1998; electronic edition 2018), chapter 1 §III, “The Language of Feeling,” with chapter notes 1–3, for experience without consciousness and the language of feeling. EPUB locators: text/part0011.html#ch1_sec3 and #ch1-fn1 through #ch1-fn3. This copy has no reliable printed-page markers. Kraus’s account is attributed to her as interpretation; her note 3 warns against imagining a completed entity that performs prehension afterward. In this vocabulary, consciousness and experience are not interchangeable.

[4] Whitehead, I.II §II, M30–39, especially the Category of the Ultimate, M31–32, and I.III §I, M46–50, for creativity. Creativity characterizes novel unification and is always found under particular conditions. Calling it creativity neither explains every particular outcome nor establishes artistic or moral progress.

[5] John B. Cobb Jr., Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (P&F Press, 2008), the complete entries “Actual Entity,” pp. 16–17, and “Actual Occasion,” pp. 17–20, for the two terms; the supplied copy is the 2008 edition. Compare Whitehead I.II §I and I.III §I with Editors’ Note 31.16, where the editors flag the uneven use of occasion when God’s agency is in view. Cobb’s proposed physical and human examples are not used to identify a measured event with one occasion.

[6] C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), Appendix, pp. 93–98, and notes 1–4 on pp. 115–116, for introductory commentary, including the contrast between becoming and perishing on the one hand and change across events on the other. These pages are a bounded part of the Appendix; its discussion of prehension continues beyond them. Mesle’s scientific comparisons and sweeping characterizations of rival philosophies are not adopted as findings here.

[7] Whitehead, I.II §II, especially M32–35, on eternal objects, and I.III §I, M46–50, on their relevance and God’s primordial valuation.

The cup, the letter, the four descriptions and the objections are original teaching material developed from the distinctions explained here; they neither reveal individual occasions nor establish the cosmology. The optional comparison with “What would explain conscious experience?” uses that course lesson’s distinction between explanatory questions; its underlying sources were not freshly researched for this lesson.