How does the past enter a new experience?

Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 03 · How an occasion becomes

Imagine setting a heavy shopping bag down on the kitchen floor. Your fingers are still sore from its handles, and as you begin unpacking, the soreness makes you handle the groceries gingerly. You need not replay the journey upstairs for that history to matter. The carrying is over, but its consequences are already part of what happens next.

The previous lesson left an occasion with two aspects, its own becoming and its achieved contribution to what follows, and the connection between them now needs explaining. How can a finished occasion enter a new experience without either beginning again or turning that experience into a second copy of itself?

Whitehead’s answer develops the idea of prehension, taking account of something as part of becoming a subject. The past contributes to the new subject’s constitution. That is more than an observer’s thought about what happened; it is Whitehead’s proposed account of causal inheritance itself. [1]

We will distinguish what is given, the perspective under which it is received and the manner of its reception. These distinctions make the proposed causal connection more precise, though we must still ask whether they explain it. The shopping scene is a human illustration: in Whitehead’s scheme it involves many occasions and identifies none of them individually.

Who feels, what is felt, and how

A prehension has three factors. Its subject is the actual entity whose becoming includes this prehension. Its datum is what is taken account of (data is the plural). Its subjective form is how that datum is taken account of in the subject’s becoming. When the datum contributes through positive prehension, Whitehead calls the prehension a feeling, and positive here means inclusion in feeling, not approval or pleasure. [1]

The difference between what is received and how it is received is familiar before we learn the technical terms. Something received can be welcome, troubling, barely significant or dominant. Subjective form concerns the character and importance of the reception; it does not make the datum imaginary or merely someone’s opinion. Nor does subjective form always involve an emotion we could name, since Whitehead extends feeling beyond conscious awareness, as the previous lesson explained.

The subject is not a finished receiver waiting for deliveries; its prehensions help constitute it. Nor are those prehensions separately completed experiences that someone later fastens together. Each belongs to the one becoming and gains its full determination within that unity, so to understand a particular feeling we must refer to the whole subject of which it is an aspect. [2]

Kraus stresses a consequence of this mutual dependence: an inherited feeling acquires its importance through its place among the other feelings of this becoming. Analyzing those contributions tells us about the constitution of one subject; it does not uncover a further producer named Creativity. [6]

The past as given, and as received

What, then, passes from the earlier actuality into the new one? Whitehead’s simplest case is a simple physical feeling, physical because its datum is an actuality rather than a pure possibility. Let A be a completed occasion and B a new occasion whose actual world includes A, the actual world being what is given for this particular becoming. A and B mark theoretical roles, not two observed moments in the shopping trip.

A is the initial datum of a simple physical feeling in B. But B does not receive the whole of A’s experience as a second copy of A. One of A’s feelings is the objective datum, the particular feeling through which A enters B’s constitution. Whitehead calls this the objectification of A for B, a word that names how one actuality functions in the becoming of another. [2] [3] [7]

Keep two actualities and two feelings distinct. A was the subject of the earlier feeling; B is the subject of a new feeling of it. The earlier feeling belongs to A’s settled achievement and now serves as the perspective through which A is received, while B’s feeling has its own subjective form. Objectification gives A a role in B without turning A and B into one subject.

Here perspective means selective functioning in the new experience; it need not involve a conscious viewpoint or an opinion about the past. The objectified actuality remains the origin of what is received, but only an aspect of its full constitution plays that role in this feeling. A later experience can therefore depend on an earlier actuality without repeating everything that actuality experienced.

The three questions can now be kept apart. Which earlier actuality contributes? That is the initial datum. Through which of its feelings does it contribute here? That is the objective datum. How is that contribution felt in the new subject? That is the subjective form. Saying only that the past matters would leave all three unanswered.

What makes this a causal inheritance?

Whitehead calls a simple physical feeling an act of causation. A is the cause and B’s feeling is the effect within the new subject, though B, the actuality conditioned by that feeling, can also be called the effect. The claim concerns what helps make B the particular actuality it becomes. [3]

The reception includes a partial re-enactment of the earlier feeling’s subjective form: something of the way A felt is carried into B’s feeling of it. Yet B’s reception belongs to a new unity, and the inheritance can be weakened, intensified or adjusted as it enters the new experience. The past constrains the manner of reception as well as supplying something to receive. The new subject does not simply attach an arbitrary response to indifferent material.

This is why Whitehead regards causal feeling as more than a representation of a cause. What B receives is a feeling that belongs to the particular actuality A, and the connection to that origin is part of what is received. In Whitehead’s account, A therefore contributes to B’s constitution under this aspect, a contribution that a new subject’s picture of A would not, by itself, supply. A’s own becoming remains finished; the new experiencing is B’s.

Inheritance has a direction, from the settled actuality into the becoming it conditions, and Whitehead calls this its vector character. The term marks directed dependence: calling the relation a feeling establishes no measurement and no particular physical vector. Earlier achievement contributes to what follows without requiring one enduring underlying substance to own both experiences.

Think again of putting down the shopping bag. An account that began only when you consciously remembered carrying it would miss the bodily history already shaping the new situation. Whitehead’s theory takes such dependence to be constitutive of the occasions involved. The example makes the question recognizable, but it neither establishes the theory nor isolates a single simple physical feeling.

Selection does not make history optional

Alongside positive feeling, Whitehead recognizes negative prehension: exclusion from positive feeling in the subject’s becoming. Negative does not simply mean hostile. Disliking something can involve feeling it intensely; exclusion concerns whether and how a datum contributes, not whether it is liked. [1] [4]

Objectification involves selection. A settled actuality has a complex constitution, and not every aspect of it can play the same role in a new unity: some aspects are excluded, while others provide the perspective through which it is felt. The selection concerns how those aspects function in the new experience. It does not undo their occurrence.

Here a crucial qualification enters. Whitehead says that every actuality in the subject’s actual world must be received through some causal feeling, however vague or submerged. Negative prehensions may eliminate its distinctive importance, but some positive causal reception remains. Because the actual world is relative to this becoming, the claim concerns the actualities given for this occasion, not every actuality indiscriminately. It does not say that everything directly affects everything else. [3]

The requirement concerns causal reception, not a complete conscious record. An actuality may matter through mediation, without being recognizable as a distinct item of experience. Losing its distinctive importance does not mean that the new occasion could have become exactly what it did without any constraint from that actuality.

Pure possibilities have a different status. Whitehead allows an eternal object, considered as a potential form, to be wholly excluded from a particular becoming, whereas a settled actuality in the subject’s actual world is a fact the new becoming must deal with. Keeping the two cases separate stops negative prehension from becoming a license to choose one’s own past. [3]

Exclusion has a manner too. Negative prehensions have subjective forms of their own, which contribute to the becoming, so what is excluded from positive feeling can still matter through the character of its exclusion. This does not secretly reinsert the excluded datum as a positive feeling. It means that the process’s exclusions help determine the experience that results. [4]

Kraus distinguishes the initial reception of actual data from exclusions that arise from the way their forms are later valued. She allows such derived negative physical prehensions while rejecting the deletion of initial data. This is her qualified interpretation of a difficult relation. The primary distinction needed here is that selective reception preserves the constraint of settled actualities within this subject’s actual world. [6]

What remains when an occasion has perished?

The previous lesson used perishing for the ending of an occasion’s immediate experiencing: its becoming is complete, and it is now a definite achievement. Whitehead’s phrase objective immortality names the persistence of that achievement as a condition for further becoming. An occasion has finished determining itself, but what it became can still help determine other occasions. [1] [3]

The word immortality can mislead. The claim does not mean that the same subject keeps having new experiences, or that somebody will consciously remember every detail forever. The occasion’s own immediacy has passed, while its achieved character can enter further experience through objectification, and its effect need not remain distinct or conspicuous.

This causal meaning must also be kept apart from Whitehead’s later account of preservation in God, which adds claims that cannot be established simply by observing that the past has consequences. Mesle distinguishes causal objective immortality, divine preservation and the further question of continued personal experience. We keep those distinctions here without trying to settle the last two questions. [8]

The present discussion concerns temporal occasions, and the previous lesson’s qualification still holds: actual entity is the broader term and includes God, whose status Whitehead does not treat as simply that of another perishing temporal occasion. [1]

Inheritance and the direction of becoming

Physical feeling takes account of actuality. Conceptual feeling takes account of an eternal object as a potential for definiteness. These are ways of analyzing experience, and neither requires consciousness. They do not name two independent beings, one bodily and one mental, meeting inside the occasion. [3]

Efficient causation concerns the inherited conditions: what the achieved world contributes and requires. Beside it Whitehead places final causation, the role of the subject’s aim toward a definite unity of experience. The two belong to one account of becoming: the past supplies conditions, and the aim concerns the unity to be achieved with them. An aim in this sense requires neither conscious planning nor an inner self completed in advance. [2] [5]

Concrescence names the becoming of one definite unity. Transition names the passage by which achieved actualities condition further becoming. Our account of inheritance has concentrated on transition and leaves concrescence unfinished: given these conditions, how does this particular unity come to be? Lesson 04 takes up conceptual valuation, aim and satisfaction, which means achieved definiteness, not pleasure or moral success.

Explanation, or a new name for the problem?

A critic can grant the distinctions and still ask what has been explained by saying that B feels A. We already knew that later events depend on earlier ones. If feeling is introduced wherever causal dependence occurs, perhaps the unfamiliar vocabulary merely redescribes the dependence.

The gain Whitehead proposes is an account of continuity that needs no enduring bearer beneath the successive occasions. What was achieved in A helps constitute B, while B’s new unity preserves its difference from A. Causal relations enter the account of what B is, instead of being added after two wholly self-contained realities have been described. The language of feeling also tries to connect causal reception with the experiential character introduced in lesson 02.

Two difficulties remain. First, does describing a partial re-enactment explain why an earlier actuality contributes to a later one, or does it assume the very connection that needed explaining? Second, what warrants treating that reception as experiential? A critic could accept constitutive causal relations while disputing the further claim of feeling. Whitehead’s account need not become a theory of a particular physical mechanism in order to offer an explanation, but it must make the connection more intelligible than the alternative does, not merely give it a new name.

Kraus stresses the past’s active efficacy rather than picturing it as inert material awaiting use, and she explicitly acknowledges that many Whitehead scholars would dispute her stronger reading. The lesson’s central question survives that disagreement: how can settled achievement condition new becoming? We can value having that question made precise while remaining unconvinced by Whitehead’s answer. [6]

The standards from lesson 01 still apply. An account that helps us interpret a familiar dependence has achieved something worth assessing, but its applicability does not yet demonstrate adequacy to every experience, or prove that no alternative metaphysics could explain the same relation.

Try an account of what the hands inherit

Imagine that Rina has carried a heavy shopping bag upstairs and set it on the kitchen floor. Her hands are sore. She starts unpacking, intent on finding the bread because lunch is late. While she hurries, the ache becomes an irritation; once the food is put away and she sits down, she feels it with relief that the carrying is over.

Use the scene to distinguish what is given, the perspective under which it matters and the manner of its reception. Then explain what initial datum and objective datum would mean in an account of one simple physical feeling, without treating the whole journey as one occasion. How can the reception change while the earlier carrying remains settled? And would attending to lunch instead of the ache show that Rina has deleted a past fact by negative prehension?

A reader offers this explanation: “Prehension happens when Rina, already a complete subject, chooses to remember the journey. The past enters her experience only because she thinks about it.” Correct the explanation, giving one reason why this scene cannot identify a single actual occasion and one question a critic could still ask of the theory.

A possible response

What is given includes the completed carrying and the bodily history out of which the present situation has arisen; in Whitehead’s account these would involve many occasions and their relations. Rina’s attention to lunch does not produce that history, and the ache can already affect what she does without her reconstructing the journey in thought.

At the level of the illustration, the perspective is the carrying’s relevance through Rina’s sore hands, with much of the journey left undistinguished. The manner of reception is how that inherited condition matters: as an unwelcome interruption while she hurries, and later with relief. Resting and finishing the task also add new conditions. We are comparing successive experiences, not imagining one completed occasion changing its attitude while everything else stays fixed.

In the more precise theoretical account, the initial datum of a simple physical feeling would be one earlier actuality, and its objective datum the particular feeling through which that actuality is objectified for a new subject. The new subject’s manner of feeling it would be the subjective form. The whole journey and the sore hands cannot simply be assigned to those two datum positions, because each is already a complex description on a human scale. The illustration helps us separate the questions without identifying their ultimate units.

The reception can change while the carrying stays settled: whether it irritates or brings relief, it remains part of the history out of which the later experience arose. Nor does attending to lunch show that the past fact has been deleted, or even that it has no causal influence. Negative prehension concerns exclusion from positive feeling, and Whitehead still requires some causal reception of each actuality in the particular subject’s actual world. An ordinary report about attention cannot tell us exactly which metaphysical prehensions occurred.

The reader’s explanation mistakes a developed conscious activity for the general relation. A corrected account would say that, for Whitehead, the new subject is constituted through taking account of its world, and conscious recollection is one possible developed experience within that wider account. A completed subject does not first stand apart from inheritance and then decide whether to admit it. Nor do separately finished prehensions assemble themselves into that subject; their relations belong to one becoming.

Nothing in the scene gives a criterion for locating one metaphysical occasion. If the theory is accepted, carrying, unpacking, hurrying and resting are human activities involving many occasions, and different descriptions of their relevant aspects can be reasonable. A strong answer distinguishes causal dependence, selective functioning and manner of reception, and keeps the earlier fact intact; it need not assign every ordinary word to a single technical category.

A critic might accept that Rina’s present depends on her bodily past while asking why this requires extending feeling to all basic actuality, or might ask what the theory explains about this dependence beyond redescribing it. Either question is legitimate. The exercise asks you to reconstruct Whitehead’s claim accurately, not to agree that he has established it.

From inheritance to concrescence

We can now say more precisely how an earlier actuality enters a new one: it contributes under a perspective, and its reception has a manner that belongs to the new subject. We have followed one constitutive relation from lesson 02 into its details. The opening lesson’s demand still stands: those details must help explain the connection, not simply supply more names for it.

The inherited world supplies conditions, but a list of conditions is not yet an account of the unity achieved. How can something new arise from what is given? That is the next step in understanding how an occasion becomes.

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 and IV (Part I, chapter II, sections I, II and IV), M27–39 and M42–45. These passages introduce objectification, subjective perishing with objective efficacy and the three factors of prehension. All three author notes to the chapter and the relevant editorial notes were read. M means the original Macmillan pages, retained in brackets, not the corrected edition’s printed pages. Editors’ Note 31.16 flags the uneven use of the terms actual entity and occasion; the qualification established in lesson 02 remains in force.

[2] Whitehead, III.I §§I–IV (Part III, chapter I, sections I–IV), M334–341, especially §II on initial data, elimination, objective datum and subjective form, and §III on the subject’s constitution through feelings. The complete §§VI–VII, M345–348, and §X, M353–356, were also read, for exclusion, integration and the novelty of subjective form. The factors can be distinguished without being treated as independent completed parts.

[3] Whitehead, the complete III.II §§I–IV, M361–372, with its author note and the relevant editorial notes:

• Section I: simple physical feeling and partial re-enactment.
• Section II: the restriction of necessary positive reception to actualities in the subject’s actual world, and the distinction of pure potentials.
• Sections III–IV: valuation and consciousness, used here only to set the limits of the lesson’s preview.

Whitehead’s comparisons with physics and neurology are not treated as contemporary empirical confirmation.

[4] Whitehead, I.II §II, M35–39, and the complete III.I §VI, M345–347, for negative prehension. Negative prehensions have subjective forms and can affect the character of the resulting feeling; their explanatory role is not reducible to consciously ignoring something. Section VI supplies the full primary context of the excerpt in Mesle’s Appendix, p. 100.

[5] Whitehead, the complete II.X §§I–V (Part II, chapter X, sections I–V), M317–328, including its numbered author note and closing substantive note, for the distinction between transition and concrescence, which supports the lesson’s account of how efficient conditions relate to final aim. The supplied EPUB has a damaged clause in §III at M324; it is neither quoted nor silently repaired here, and the account relies on the sound surrounding passages, especially §§I–II and V. Whitehead’s readings of other philosophers are not presented as settled historical conclusions.

[6] 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 5 §§I and III, with the chapter notes, especially note 8, and chapter 4, note 1, for the importance of inherited feelings, derived negative prehensions and the past’s efficacy. EPUB locators: text/part0015.html#ch5_sec1, #ch5_sec3 and #ch5-fn8; text/part0014.html#ch4-fn1. This copy has no reliable printed-page markers. Her account of past agency and her qualification of negative physical prehensions are attributed to her as interpretations, not presented as a scholarly consensus.

[7] Donald W. Sherburne, A Key to Whitehead’s Process and Reality (University of Chicago Press, 1981 edition; original copyright 1966), pp. 9–12, including the diagram on p. 10, which was inspected, for initial and objective data. The source key’s explanation and the relevant rows on pp. 249–250 were checked. Each of the guide’s rearranged passages used here was followed to its complete context in the corrected edition: I.II §II, III.I §§II–III and X, and III.II §I. Other fragments on those pages are not independent support for this lesson, and no rearrangement is presented as a continuous Whitehead quotation.

[8] C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), Appendix, pp. 98–100 and 107–109, with note 13 on p. 117, for objective immortality and its distinction from divine preservation and continued personal experience. These spans include his complete discussions of prehension, objectification and objective immortality, with parts of the adjacent subsections. Mesle’s scientific comparisons and his speculation about personal survival are not adopted as findings.

The shopping scene, the exercise and the explanatory criticism are original teaching material; they neither identify individual occasions nor prove the metaphysics.