At one point in Process and Reality, Whitehead borrows an epithet from William James and declares that ‘We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience’ (Whitehead 1978: 50). Previous chapters have outlined some of the ways in which philosophy has prioritised such ‘solitary substances’ in terms of individual items of existence, things or objects, which are designated or described by nouns and whose integral characters have become divorced from their perceptions by other entities. The properties that are assigned to such objects have a problematic status; they appear to be not just secondary, but illusory, creations of the perceiver rather than the perceived. In this way, the problem of correlationism is allowed to enter the scene. Objects are unknowable in themselves and human experience always refers back to itself via either thought or language. This chapter, following Whitehead, will turn to the ‘buzzing world’ in which things happen. This notion of happening will move the discussion from the supposed primacy of self-identical objects to the eventful character of existence. It will use the concept of verbs, especially in their infinitive or infinite mode, as discussed by Gilles Deleuze (1925–95), to develop this line of thought.

The Question of Process

The idea of process has had its place in the work of many philosophers, although it is a notion that has often been neglected. The Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus sums up one aspect when he famously said: ‘You cannot step into the same river twice.’ Because a river flows, by definition its waters are always changing and it is therefore impossible to step into exactly the same river again. What makes a river a river is that its waters are always different. A river is constantly in flow, in flux. Heraclitus extends this idea and says that everything that exists ‘flows’ or is in a state of constant change.