On Appetition in Whitehead’s Proccess

There’s a little excerpt that I’d like to discuss and we didn’t have the chance to do so in the reading today:

“God’s immanence in the the world in respect to his primordial nature is an urge towards the future based upon an appetite in the present. Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge towards realization of the datum conceptually prehended. For example, ‘thirst’ is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching”

“Appetition is immediate matter of fact including in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not and may be. The immediate occasion thereby conditions creativity so as to procure, in the future, physical realization of its mental pole, according to the various valuations inherent in its various conceptual prehensions. All physical experience is accompanied by an appetite for, or against, its continuance: an example is the appetition of self-preservation. But the origination of the novel conceptual prehension has, more especially, to be accounted for. Thirst is an appetite towards a difference- towards something relevant, something barely identical, but something with a definite novelty. This is an example at a low level which shows the germ of a free imagination”

This part is important to bring it up at the shadow of what we began today with the second part of the book, and that is how an actual realization brings with it its own realization or culmination, related to other states contrasted by itself, like quenching thirst or eating out of hunger. This little excerpt is for ilustrating how Whitehead thinks about the relational existence between a given thing and its ends, asking for its final causes rather than a realization of its existence. The desire of drinking water is brought up together with its negation, the non-drinking stage of thirst. In this particular sense I think that we can picture his discussion on positive and negative prehensions, in the continuation or against a certain actual thing. We can maybe discuss this later when we get in deep waters with his metaphysics, but for the moment I think this can be of help towards his readings on prehension parallel to the state of a certain appetite.