Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I In Search of a New Metaphysics
- Part II From Permanence to Process
- Part III From Process to Permanence
- 6 Changing Shapes of Reality: Understanding Nature under a Social Analogy
- 7 Theological Afterthoughts: A Neo-Platonic God for a Darwinian Universe?
- 8 Conclusion: The Ethics of Creativity – A Deweyan Critique
- Appendix: The Making of a Metaphysician – A Biographical Note
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Changing Shapes of Reality: Understanding Nature under a Social Analogy
from Part III - From Process to Permanence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 December 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I In Search of a New Metaphysics
- Part II From Permanence to Process
- Part III From Process to Permanence
- 6 Changing Shapes of Reality: Understanding Nature under a Social Analogy
- 7 Theological Afterthoughts: A Neo-Platonic God for a Darwinian Universe?
- 8 Conclusion: The Ethics of Creativity – A Deweyan Critique
- Appendix: The Making of a Metaphysician – A Biographical Note
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
FACT AND FORM
As described so far, Whitehead's universe of actual occasions is a world of sheer becoming. It is a Heraclitean cosmos in which ‘all things flow’. As he puts it:
Without doubt, if we are to go back to that ultimate, integral experience, unwarped by the sophistications of theory, that experience whose elucidation is the final aim of philosophy, the flux of things is one ultimate generalization around which we must weave our philosophical system. (PR 208)
Nevertheless, Whitehead is not oblivious of the fact that the world we inhabit is also a world of enduring objects:
But there is a rival notion, antithetical to the former … This other notion dwells on permanences of things – the solid earth, the mountains, the stones, the Egyptian Pyramids, the spirit of man, God. (PR 208)
This rival notion is not entirely wrong. Even a mountain can be conceptualised as an event if one considers its existence within the horizon of millennia instead of years. But the mountain does not exist in a flash in the way that the momentary actual occasions do. And the same is true of all macroscopic entities of everyday life, chairs and tables for instance, as well as our own bodies; we do grow and decay, yet not all of a sudden.
In order to account for permanence, Whitehead introduces new ontological categories. The first relevant concept is that of eternal object. Among the basic categories of his system, he explains, ‘actual entities and eternal objects stand out with a certain extreme finality’ (PR 22).
‘Eternal objects’ is, roughly, Whitehead's designation for what are traditionally called Universals. In spite of his characterisation of Western philosophy as ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’ (PR 39), they are not conceived as ontologically independent entities like Plato's Ideas. Rather, they are conceived after the guise of Aristotle as the forms of things, that is to say, they are nothing apart from the concrete objects that instantiate them. The reason behind this choice should be obvious.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Whitehead's Metaphysics of PowerReconstructing Modern Philosophy, pp. 79 - 100Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017