## Whitehead — Process and Reality (minimalist)
Alfred North Whitehead replaces substance-based metaphysics with a process view: reality is made of events — “actual occasions” — each a brief act of becoming that integrates past data and adds novelty.
Core ideas
- **Actual occasions:** Fundamental units of reality. Each is a process of prehension (taking in past actualities and possibilities) and concrescence (becoming determinate).
- **Creativity:** The ultimate principle. Novelty constantly arises; actuality is always an emergence.
- **Societies/Enduring objects:** Persistent things (persons, rocks, institutions) are patterns or societies of occasions — repeated, related occasions, not unchanging substances.
- **Identity:** Identity is continuity of pattern and causal relations. A person is a society of occasions bound by memory, causal links, and recurrent form — not a permanent inner substance.
- **The self:** The self is a sustained pattern of occasions. Each occasion has subjective experience, and a person’s identity flows from how occasions inherit and shape one another over time.
Mind and causation
- **Experience is pervasive:** “Feeling” or prehension is primitive — not limited to human minds. All occasions have subjective aspects.
- **Causal role of experience:** Occasions’ prehensions shape how later occasions arise. Mental-like processes are part of how reality unfolds, but they operate within wider causal constraints.
- **Not idealism:** Whitehead rejects the view that ideas alone create reality. Actual occasions are constrained by objective data (the past, physical conditions) and by Creativity.
God (twofold)
- **Primordial nature:** Source of eternal possibilities — the lure toward many-valued forms of value.
- **Consequent nature:** God’s experience of the world; God prehends and values every occasion.
- **Dipolar God:** Both transcendent (providing possibilities) and immanent (feeling the world). God persuades rather than coerces; divine influence offers possibilities but does not enforce outcomes.
Why it matters (brief)
- Recasts identity as temporal and relational.
- Makes mind a basic feature of reality without making humans absolute creators.
- Reframes God as participant and valuer within becoming, not an omnipotent controller.
Key references in Process and Reality
- Creativity and categories: Part I, Ch. I.
- Actual occasion and concrescence: Part II, Chs. I–III.
- Societies and enduring objects: Part II, Ch. VII.
- God’s primordial and consequent natures: Part I, Ch. VII.
Further reading (concise)
- Charles Hartshorne — accessible development of Whitehead’s theology.
- John Cobb & David Griffin — introductions to process thought.
- Victor Lowe — clear commentary on Process and Reality.
