For Alfred North Whitehead, the idea (or “eternal object”, as he would have it) finds its place within a “process philosophy” that he calls “the philosophy of organism” (in Process and Reality). His emphasis on systemic unity, on final causation and on the reality of the idea can all be compared directly to the inheritance of German speculative idealism. In his assertion of the fundamental indeterminacy of the event (or “actual occasion”, as he terms it), and of the ontological generality of “decision” in that context, he revives, also, the broader German idealist (and Romantic) concern with the relation between freedom and nature. Unlike the German idealists, however, Whitehead attempts to solve the problem by placing freedom, and creativity, at the heart of every “atomic” component of nature.

PROCESS

What does the term “process” mean for Whitehead? He gives an account of the connectedness of things, and of the nature of change and transformation. However, there is something very strange in his account of these things, certainly in terms of our normal common-sense conception of change, because while Whitehead is interested in change, there is a profound sense in which, for him, no thing ever actually changes, and, moreover, that spatial extension, in a mechanical, Newtonian sense, does not exist either. “The baseless metaphysical doctrine of ‘undifferentiated endurance’ is a subordinate derivative from the misapprehension of the proper character of the extensive scheme” (PR 77).