Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Part I In Search of a New Metaphysics
- Part II From Permanence to Process
- 3 Deconstructing Tradition: Substance Revisited
- 4 The Flowing Self: From Monads to Actual Occasions
- 5 Overcoming the Cartesian Legacy: The Process Concept of Substance
- Part III From Process to Permanence
- Appendix: The Making of a Metaphysician – A Biographical Note
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Deconstructing Tradition: Substance Revisited
from Part II - From Permanence to Process
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
- 3 Deconstructing Tradition: Substance Revisited
- 4 The Flowing Self: From Monads to Actual Occasions
- 5 Overcoming the Cartesian Legacy: The Process Concept of Substance
- Part III From Process to Permanence
- Appendix: The Making of a Metaphysician – A Biographical Note
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE MEANING OF SUBSTANCE
The label ‘metaphysics of process’ is sometimes used in antithesis to ‘metaphysics of substance’. This is not mistaken, but inaccurate. The term ‘substance’ has been used in a variety of meanings in the history of philosophy. Specifically, the term has been used to designate all of the following (the list is not meant to be exhaustive):
That which truly is.
That which is capable of action.
That which is always a subject of predication and never a predicate.
The underlying bearer of properties.
That which remains identical throughout change.
That which requires nothing else in order to exist.
That which is simple (that is, no substance has parts that are themselves substances).
That which is not affected from without.
In his account of the nature of the ultimate building blocks of reality, Whitehead retains the meanings (1) and (2), but rejects all others: the basic substances are power-units of sorts, capable of both acting and being acted upon. This is, he thinks, Plato's teaching in the Sophist. In Adventures of Ideas he first quotes a passage from Benjamin Jowett's translation of this crucial dialogue:
My suggestion would be, that anything which possesses any sort of power to affect another, or to be affected by another even for a moment, however trifling the cause and however slight and momentary the effect, has real existence; and I hold that the definition of being is simply power. (Sophist, 247, as quoted in AI 119)
Then, he comments on it as follows:
Plato says that it is the definition of being that it exert power and be subject to the exertion of power. This means that the essence of being is to be implicated in causal action on other beings … Plato enunciates the doctrine that ‘action and reaction’ belong to the essence of being. (AI 119–20)
The rejected notions (3)–(8), all of which can be traced back, either directly or indirectly, to Aristotle's Categories, are systematically connected. The logical notion of a substance as a subject of predication (3) has its immediate counterpart in the ontological conception of a substance as a bearer of properties (4).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Whitehead's Metaphysics of PowerReconstructing Modern Philosophy, pp. 31 - 46Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017