How can something new arise from what is given?

Whitehead: becoming, experience and the world · Lesson 04 · How an occasion becomes

Imagine a drop of blue ink landing on a card you have nearly finished. You had wanted a clean margin. The ink has dried, and rubbing it only damages the paper. Then you notice that a green outline could turn the blot into part of a leaf: the mark would remain, but it would take a different place in the finished card.

The accident has narrowed what you can do, and it has also become material for something you had not planned. This familiar mix of constraint and invention opens Whitehead’s question: if a new experience receives its conditions from an already settled world, how can it become anything more than their repetition?

In Whitehead’s account, drawing and noticing involve many occasions; neither the blot nor the decision picks out a single one. We can still use the scene to tell apart what is inherited, what is possible, what is relevant here and what is actually achieved, though it cannot establish the metaphysics it helps us understand.

Inheritance and possibility now come together in concrescence, the becoming of a definite unity. How does a possibility come to matter within what is being made, and why does Whitehead think the answer needs God? These questions close the opening stage, How an occasion becomes. The lesson’s ordinary exercise returns to the marked card, and it asks for more than agreement: understanding the argument includes being able to dispute it.

The unity still to be achieved

Lesson 03 separated the source of an inheritance from what it selectively contributes. In a simple physical feeling, the earlier actuality is the initial datum, and one of its feelings supplies the objective datum through which it is objectified; the new feeling has its own subjective form, its manner of reception. The question now is how that received contribution finds its place in the unity being achieved. [2]

A list of inherited data does not yet tell us how they form one experience. What place will each have? What will be emphasized, and how will such different contributions be felt together? Concrescence is their becoming one particular, definite experience. And the growing definiteness constitutes the subject itself: no fully formed observer waits behind the process to approve its result. [1] [3]

Nor do independently finished prehensions meet and assemble a subject; each gains its definite role within the whole becoming. Elizabeth Kraus emphasizes this mutual dependence: where a feeling stands in the completed experience is part of what that feeling is. We can distinguish the contributions to explain the unity without breaking it into self-sufficient little experiences. [7]

Whitehead calls the completed unity satisfaction. At that point nothing in the occasion’s character remains undecided: what was open in its becoming has become determinate. The word does not mean that someone feels pleased, has solved a practical problem or has acted well; it names the completion of this actuality. Its own becoming ends, and its achievement becomes available to condition further becoming. [1] [3]

Two kinds of explanation therefore belong together. Efficient causation concerns the conditions inherited from achieved actualities. Final causation concerns the unity toward which this becoming is directed. Whitehead calls that direction the subjective aim: how the given world is to be felt together, with a particular pattern and intensity. Its reach includes both the immediate experience and the future relevant to it, though it need not involve conscious foresight. The aim belongs to the constitution of the subject. It is not a plan adopted by a subject that is already complete. [1] [3] [4]

A possibility is not an unfinished thing

Lesson 02 introduced eternal objects as potentials for definiteness. A particular shade of blue, considered apart from any instance of it, is the kind of thing the term is meant to pick out. It differs both from the ink on this card and from your actual thought about the ink: the shade is a possible character, while the spill and the imagining are actual occurrences. [1]

Calling the possibility eternal means that it does not itself undergo the history of its instances. Blue ink may dry or fade, but the potential character does not grow older along with it. Eternal objects are not little objects stored in a second place; they are ways in which actuality can be definite. Whitehead calls their functioning in an actual entity’s character ingression. [1]

This gives novelty a particular meaning. A new occasion, for Whitehead, does not manufacture new eternal objects; it achieves a new actuality in which potentials have definite roles. Even a largely repetitive occasion is a new individual, while a more striking novelty may involve a different pattern or valuation of what it inherits. Neither kind requires possibilities to be miniature events waiting to happen.

Two questions now need to be kept apart. What forms could characterize actuality, considered generally? And what can become actual from this particular world? The first concerns what Whitehead calls general or pure potentiality; the second concerns real potentiality, possibility conditioned by an actual situation. [5]

Consider a curved outline as a possible form, without specifying a card, an instrument or anyone to draw it. That is different from the possibility of drawing a particular green outline around this blot, which depends on the mark, the available pen, the paper and the capacities brought to the task. A spotless card of the kind you first intended is not equally available under these conditions. The given world is what makes the differences among possibilities matter.

The distinction, then, is between a potential form and a situated possibility. The whole proposal to turn this mark into a leaf should not be called one eternal object: it already refers to particular things and their history. And even a relevant proposal differs from its achievement: an available outline may never be drawn.

How inherited form becomes available for something else

Whitehead’s account connects physical feeling, which receives actuality, with conceptual feeling, whose datum is a potential form. Conceptual here does not mean consciously having a concept. Neither kind of feeling requires consciousness; they are distinguishable aspects of one becoming. [1] [4]

His first step is conceptual reproduction: from a physical feeling arises a conceptual feeling of the eternal object exemplified in what is physically felt. What was received as the definite character of an actuality is now also felt as a potential for definiteness, and that makes room for it to play a different role in the new experience. Reproducing a form conceptually does not force the new occasion to give it exactly the importance it had before. [4]

The subjective form of conceptual feeling is valuation. It determines both how the potential contributes to an integrated feeling and how much importance that contribution receives. Whitehead calls the enhancement and attenuation of this importance valuing up and valuing down, so a physically received character can remain present while carrying a different weight in the new experience. Valuation is not an independent adjustment made to the other feelings: its own character depends on them and on the unity being achieved. Nor need it be a conscious judgment or a verdict on moral worth. [4]

On the card, the blue can stop dominating as a spoiled margin and become an important element of a pattern. The mark has not been removed; what changes is its role in the experience being developed. This is an analogy for valuation, not an analysis of one conceptual feeling: the drawing involves bodily activity, perception and many successive occasions.

A new use of the blue may surprise the person drawing without introducing a form that was never realized in the inherited world. Whitehead asks a further question: what about a potential that is not exemplified in the temporal data being received? He first introduces conceptual reversion to account for the origination of feelings of relevant alternatives. Reversion is not simply going backward. It involves a difference grounded in some identity with what is already given: enough connection to belong to this becoming, and enough difference to enter a new pattern. [4]

A contrast, in this sense, brings diverse elements into one felt pattern while keeping their differences. Difference alone need not be fruitful; an unrelated addition may defeat the unity being sought. Reversion is directed toward alternatives capable of such integration. The green and blue on the card illustrate the ordinary idea of differences acquiring a common role, but they do not show that a particular metaphysical contrast has been observed.

Reversion describes the novelty, but it leaves its relevance unexplained. Why should this unrealized potential belong among the alternatives for this becoming? An indefinitely long list of possible forms would not yet answer that question. Whitehead next asks where an actual reason for their ordered relevance could be found.

Where the reason must be found

The ontological principle is Whitehead’s rule that the reasons conditioning an occasion must be found in actuality. A condition has its reason either in some actual entity in the world given for this becoming or in the subject being constituted. A possibility cannot do the work of an actual reason merely by being possible, and an abstract name such as Creativity cannot act as an additional producer. [1]

The principle does not say that earlier events determine the whole result; it counts the present subject and its aim among the reasons. It asks where in actual existence a condition belongs, while allowing that the new actuality helps determine itself. That qualification matters both to the appeal to God and to the question of freedom.

Why Whitehead introduces God

A temporal occasion inherits forms already realized in its world, but Whitehead also wants to explain the relevance of forms that are not realized there. For their relations to have an actual ground, he argues, these alternatives must be felt together and valued, and pure possibilities cannot do that work themselves. He therefore proposes an actuality whose conceptual valuation embraces the entire range of eternal objects, and he calls this valuation God’s primordial nature. The ontological principle directs the step: on his account, an abstract order cannot replace the actuality in which the ordering must have its reason. [6]

What this valuation offers a particular temporal becoming depends on that becoming’s world: an alternative relevant here may be irrelevant elsewhere. Whitehead calls the direction toward a possible achievement under these conditions the initial aim. Receiving it need not mean hearing an instruction or consciously recognizing God. It is a condition of becoming, and it leaves the further determination of the aim to the occasion’s own concrescence. [6]

The argument therefore needs more than the observation that novel things happen. Whitehead must also show that temporal actualities cannot themselves ground the relevant order of unrealized possibilities; if worldly capacities can do that work, the ontological principle alone has not established a divine valuation. We can understand the role he assigns to God and still ask whether that role requires God.

Why the explanation of reversion changes

The appeal to God changes the account of novelty within the book itself. In a single section (III.III §III), Whitehead first presents the Category of Conceptual Reversion and then asks what accounts for the relative proximity of unrealized potentials. His more fundamental explanation appeals to the relevant order in God’s experience. A temporal occasion receives that divine actuality through a conceptual feeling belonging to God. Such reception is a hybrid physical feeling: physical because what is received is an actual entity, not because God is a material body.

From this reception the recipient can derive a conceptual feeling of its own. That is a further relation, not the same feeling simply moved from God into the occasion. Conceptual reproduction now explains what at first seemed to need an independent source of conceptual novelty, and Whitehead accordingly proposes abolishing the independent Category of Reversion. [4] [6]

The relevant novelty has not been withdrawn; its explanation has been revised. We should therefore not treat the categories as an unchanging list of separate axioms. Here the text develops its own account, with the ontological principle directing the development.

Primordial does not mean an early divine episode followed much later by another. Whitehead distinguishes God’s valuation of possibilities from God’s reception of achieved actualities, which he calls the consequent nature. These are aspects of one God, and the primordial nature considered alone is an abstraction from that actuality. Lesson 02’s qualification also still holds: actual entity is the broader term that includes God, and God is not simply another perishing temporal occasion. The fuller questions of preservation, loss and evil belong to lesson 09. [6] [9]

The subject’s own determination

The subjective aim guides valuation toward a unity that is still being achieved. As the feelings acquire their definite relations and importance, this subject acquires its definite character. Whitehead calls that determination self-determination because it belongs to the becoming as a whole: it is neither an external command nor a further act by a self already waiting inside. The subject is what is becoming definite. [2] [4]

This self-determination is limited. In some occasions the room for autonomous modification is negligible, and inherited patterns dominate. Even when modification matters, the world is not optional: an occasion cannot choose a different settled past, and its decision concerns what it becomes from its conditions. Whitehead leaves a remainder for its own determination while insisting that the decision be relevant to what is given. [1] [4]

The account should not be enlarged into a proof of libertarian human freedom. Such a proof would have to establish that a person could have acted otherwise in the relevant sense, and it would need an account of the person and the action. An element of metaphysical self-determination settles none of those questions. It does not establish quantum indeterminacy or guarantee moral improvement either, and neither the intensity of an experience nor its completion as a satisfaction is a measure of its goodness.

Ordinary illustrations have a further limit. Drawing the outline follows the spill in clock time, but Whitehead’s genetic phases, the distinguishable phases within concrescence, are not smaller events occupying successive measured intervals inside one occasion. They exhibit relations of dependence within its becoming, and the unity of the whole occasion is involved throughout. [5] [7] [9]

So we cannot label the spill, the noticing, the planning and the drawing as the internal phases of a single occasion; they are distinguishable human activities spread across time. Whitehead’s later account of extension will distinguish the constitution of an occasion from the analysis of its completed spatial and temporal extent. For now, the important point is that becoming a unity is not a sequence of independently finished pieces.

Two questions the account must face

First, must unrealized possibilities have a divine valuation to be relevant? C. Robert Mesle asks whether the world itself could contain possibilities that have not yet been actualized, and he regards Whitehead’s argument as depending on an excessively Platonic conception of possibilities. This is Mesle’s objection to the account, not Whitehead’s own conclusion, and Mesle also acknowledges that Whitehead gives God an essential role here. [8]

An objector can accept that possibilities need an actual ground while denying that the ground must be a non-temporal divine actuality. Perhaps worldly arrangements and capacities can ground alternatives that have never occurred. A defender of Whitehead must then explain why that proposal falls short: why can such capacities not account for the ordered alternatives on which they depend? Saying once more that something new happens does not decide between these explanations.

Second, does self-determination explain decision? If an occasion determines its aim, what guides that determination? Appealing to another aim seems to require yet another, and the question threatens to continue indefinitely. Mesle presents this difficulty without claiming an easy solution. [8]

One response available within Whitehead’s account is that the demand for a further chooser misdescribes the process. The aim is immanent in becoming, and the subject is the unity being constituted; there need not be a series of inner agents choosing one another’s aims. Removing that misleading picture, however, does not yet explain why this particular outcome becomes definite. A critic can still ask whether self-determination names the very remainder that needed explanation. The dispute is about how much the account of a constituting unity explains, not merely about whether it avoids an inner chooser.

Try the possibilities of a marked card

Imagine that Nell is making a card, and blue ink has dried into an irregular blot in its margin. She has the card, a green pen and enough room to draw around the mark, but she cannot erase, cover or replace the marked paper. She considers a curved outline, then draws one that makes the blue mark part of a leaf. These events are stipulated; they are not evidence that an actual occasion has been isolated.

Distinguish the inherited constraint, a pure possibility, a possibility relevant to this situation and the achieved result, and explain why the particular leaf proposal is not simply one eternal object. What does the distinction between efficient conditions and aim add to your account? And why must the human sequence not be used as a clock for the genetic phases of one occasion?

A reader says: “There was a new result, so Nell’s activity proves that God supplied the possibility.” Does surprise at the result establish that its forms were absent from the inherited world? Identify the further reasoning Whitehead needs, including the ontological principle and a premise that a critic could reject. Finally, connect the scene to the whole opening stage: what does the method of lesson 01 ask us to assess, what would an occasion be, and how do inheritance and concrescence belong together? Give a reasoned assessment rather than a profession of agreement.

A possible response

The inherited constraint includes the dried mark and the condition of the paper, together with Nell’s available materials and acquired capacities. It is not the same as her dislike of the blot: her response can change while the spill remains settled. In Whitehead’s account these ordinary descriptions concern a complex history of occasions; the whole accident is not the initial datum of one simple physical feeling. At that more precise level, an earlier actuality would be the initial datum and its objectifying feeling the objective datum. Keeping the two levels distinct preserves lesson 03’s account of inheritance.

A certain curvature, considered apart from any bearer or occurrence, illustrates pure possibility. The possibility of this green line giving this blue mark a place in a leaf is situated: it depends on the card and what can be done with it. The complete proposal therefore includes actual particulars as well as potential forms, which is why it is not simply one eternal object. A different relevant pattern might also have been available; relevance need not identify a unique, inevitable result.

The achieved result is the actually marked card and the actual drawing experience described in the scene, both of which involve many occasions. Drawing the line makes one available result actual; merely thinking of it had not achieved it. Nor does Nell create a new eternal object. The new use of the blue can surprise her while drawing entirely on forms already realized in her inherited world, so surprise does not establish that those forms were absent from it. The scene distinguishes a novel achievement from the stronger claim that its relevant forms cannot be derived from temporal inheritance.

Efficient conditions concern what the received situation supplies and constrains. Aim concerns the unity sought with those conditions: in this human example, a card whose mark belongs to a recognizable pattern. The green outline changes the place of the blue without undoing the spill, and that makes one aspect of valuation intelligible. At the metaphysical level, however, the subject’s aim and feelings belong to its constitution; there is no finished inner Nell making each occasion out of separately completed prehensions. Nor are the successive acts of spilling, noticing and drawing the genetic phases of an occasion. The human sequence is an analogy across many occasions, not an observation of the process within one.

The reader’s inference fails: the new result does not establish God. Whitehead’s reconstruction requires the ontological principle: effective conditions and ordered relevance must have a reason in actual existence. It also requires the claim that temporal actualities and pure potentials cannot by themselves supply the relevant ordering of unrealized alternatives; God’s primordial valuation is offered as that actual ground. A critic could accept the first requirement and reject the second, arguing that the world’s own capacities ground possibilities not previously realized. Mesle’s objection gives that disagreement a definite target, and a defender must answer it, not simply point again to the leaf.

Lesson 01’s method asks what this account enables us to understand and what its explanation presupposes. Coherence would require inheritance, possibility and aim to belong to one interdependent account of actuality; logical consistency would require that its claims not contradict one another. The scene can illustrate an application, but it cannot establish adequacy to every experience or the necessity of the entire scheme. At the level introduced in lesson 02, an occasion would be a basic experiential becoming, not the durable card or Nell’s whole activity. Lesson 03 explains how such an occasion receives an actual world, and concrescence concerns the definite unity it achieves with inherited conditions and relevant possibilities. These are connected explanatory tasks, not four names for the same event.

A reasoned assessment might find the account illuminating because it places constraint and novelty within one process, while remaining unconvinced that relevance requires divine valuation. Or it might defend that valuation while acknowledging that the account of self-determination leaves a difficult question about decision. Either answer can be accurate. But neither the ingenuity of the drawing nor pleasure in the result proves that novelty is moral progress, that the metaphysics establishes human freedom or that the remaining explanatory questions have been settled.

From becoming to endurance

The marked card brings the opening stage’s questions together. An actuality inherits a world, meets relevant possibilities and becomes a definite achievement. Whitehead has offered reasons for connecting these claims, and he has left us reasons to question the need for divine valuation and his explanation of self-determination. The stage closes with an account to assess, not a completed proof.

The card can stay on a shelf after the making is done, and familiar things endure through many changes. If the occasions through which they exist complete their becoming and perish, what maintains that endurance? The next lesson turns from the unity achieved in one becoming to the order inherited across many.

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 §§II–IV (Part I, chapter II, sections II–IV), M30–45, with the chapter’s author notes and relevant editorial notes, for the categories, the ontological principle, satisfaction, and freedom and determination. For the exercise’s return to method, I.I §I, M4–6, was also read completely with its author note. M means the original Macmillan pages, retained in brackets, not the corrected edition’s printed pages.

[2] Whitehead, complete III.II §I, M361–365, and III.I §III, M338–340, for the distinction between initial and objective datum and for the constitution of the subject through its feelings. Neither of these additional complete sections identifies any ordinary action or measured physical event as one occasion.

[3] Whitehead, complete II.X §§I–V, M317–328, with its numbered author note and closing substantive note, for concrescence, transition and the distinction between efficient conditions and final aim. The support comes from the sound passages, particularly §§I–II and V. The supplied EPUB has a damaged clause in §III at M324, which is neither quoted nor silently repaired here.

[4] Whitehead, III.II §§II–III, M365–369, and complete III.III §§I–III, M373–382, with relevant notes, for conceptual feeling, valuation, initial aim, autonomy and reversion. III.III §II explains hybrid physical feeling, and §III uses it to explain the reception of relevant novelty; that re-explanation culminates in the proposed abolition of the independent Category of Reversion. Editorial notes 26.37 and 250.10 record Whitehead’s cross-references between the category’s early formulation and this later passage. No complete taxonomy of feelings is attempted.

[5] Whitehead, complete II.II §II, M101–108, with its relevant author notes, and IV.I §I, M433–436, for the distinctions between general and real potentiality and between genetic becoming and succession in physical time. The lesson’s account of phases follows these primary passages; it gives no measured duration for an occasion and claims no contemporary scientific confirmation.

[6] Whitehead, complete I.III §I, M46–50, and III.III §§I–III, M373–382, for God’s primordial valuation and the reception of its relevance. These belong to Whitehead’s proposed explanation; they are not premises established by the invented example. I.III §I also names the consequent nature and qualifies the primordial nature considered in abstraction. Editors’ Note 31.16 records the uneven use of the terms actual entity and occasion. The broader theological questions are deferred.

[7] 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), complete chapter 5 §§I and III with chapter notes, especially 1–2 and 5–7, for mutual determination and valuation. Her emphasis on these is commentary, checked against the primary contexts above. EPUB locators: text/part0015.html#ch5_sec1 and #ch5_sec3; this copy has no reliable printed-page markers.

[8] C. Robert Mesle, Process-Relational Philosophy: An Introduction to Alfred North Whitehead (Templeton Foundation Press, 2008), Appendix, pp. 97–106, with the relevant linked notes, specifically notes 6–7 on p. 116, for his objection about possibilities and his discussion of the regress in freedom, both attributed to him. The span contains his complete discussions of possibility, prehension, dipolarity, concrescence, relativity and aim, with parts of the adjacent material. His scientific comparisons are not adopted as evidence, and the works he quotes were not independently read for this lesson.

[9] John B. Cobb Jr., Whitehead Word Book: A Glossary with Alphabetical Index to Technical Terms in Process and Reality (P&F Press, supplied 2008 edition), complete entries “Subjective Aim and Decision,” pp. 57–58; “Coordinate and Genetic Division of Actual Occasions,” pp. 58–59; “Concrescence and Time,” pp. 59–60; “Creativity as the Ultimate,” pp. 66–67; “God,” pp. 67–69; and “The Primordial and Consequent Natures of God,” pp. 69–71, for concise glosses of these terms. The primary IV.I §I governs the distinction between genetic and coordinate analysis, and Cobb’s driving and physical illustrations are not used to identify occasions.

The card example, the exercise and the critical comparisons are original teaching material.