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Mary Jo…viewed from a third-person perspective, and measuring its occurrence by clock time, it can be very short (a split second) or longer. Whitehead doesn’t say. However, contrary to what I just said, Whitehead also proposes that, in truth, the moment happens all as once, and that its internal phases are merely logical phases, not temporal phases. So think of a happens-all-at-once moment preceded and succeeded by other happens-all-at-once moments. The are indivisible and cannot be infinitely broken down. They can be analyzed, but not further divided temporally.

Yes, Miriam. They are both processes. Prehensions are feelings: that is, acts of taking into the account or feeling the presence of other things. Those other things can be other actualities in the past actual world, potentialities in the mind, or various combinations thereof. A given process of concrescence consists of many, many prehensions — many feelings — that form the subjective immediacy of the process itself. They are, as it were, the building blocks of the process of concresence. Always these prehensions are clothed by subjective forms or emotions, the two most typical of which are attraction and aversion. So….think of a process of concrescence as an activity consisting of many prehensions that are growing into the momentary unity of a single moment of experience. Concrescence is this growing together. It is the many things being prehended, and the prehensions themselves, as growing into the complex unity of one moment. Make sense?

Leslie,

To my mind, eternal objects are a little like Platonic forms than Jungian archetypes. They are objects of conceptual prehension: like E=MC2 or a particular shade of yellow. By contrast, archetypes, at least in the Jungian sense, are the kinds of “things” that appear in dreams and fantasies. They have an energy to them, an alluring quality. They may also carry wisdom of their own. So when I think of archetypes I think of “energies and intelligences” in pre-conscious experience.
Some of them are collective or shared by many people, perhaps by the entire human family as part of a collective unconscious. “The goddess” and “the sage” and “the circle” as a symbol of wholeness. They may call to us in ways that eternal objects don’t. Their calling may be positive or negative, healthy or unhealthy, and always, when they rise to consciousness, they are interpreted as they are prehended. So even as they are objectively immortal they are also social constructed in a sense; and it’s very hard to tell the difference. For some people the living presence of God may work through them; they can be carriers of initial aims. But that’s just my way of thinking about them; others may differ. A woman named Sheri Kling has written a book that is relevant here: Whitehead’s Metaphysics as a Cosmological Framework for Transpersonal Psychology. You can read a bit about her and her work here: https://www.openhorizons.org/sheri-d-kling-whitehead-jung-and-psycho-spiritual-wholeness.html. Thanks for raising this issue.

What good questions. I’ll take them in order:

For Whitehead the “eternal objects” are very abstract and, as it were, pure. There are no new eternal objects. I’m going to quote John Cobb on this. He writes: “E=mc2 is an eternal object; so is a definite shade of yellow. These eternal objects are directly illustrated in our world—in quite different ways. Anything that can be abstracted from experience and then can recur is an eternal object. There are also eternal objects that have never been actualized and never will be. A seven-dimensional space, also, is an eternal object, in that it can be thought about by mathematicians.” For more from John on this, see this page in Open Horizons: https://www.openhorizons.org/eternal-objects.html Given that there are no new eternal objects, there is no ‘novelty’ in this timeless side of God. However, there are other kinds of possibilities which are different from eternal objects, and they emerge all the time. They are propositions, which are mixed potentials. They combine a sense of what can be in the actual world with pure potentials in the form of an idea that has a subject-predicate pattern. E.g. I will go the store. The “I” refers to me, the ‘going to the store’ combines myriad pure potentials, They are held together in the mind’s eye as a contrast. They are what Whitehead calls “lures for feeling.” The initial phase of the subjective aim is one such proposition: the best for the situation at hand, provided by Gd. The very idea that God could provide them means that the primordial nature has been informed by the consequent nature: Gd had to be aware of what was happening in the world (consequent nature) in order to know that particular potentials (primordial nature) were relevant. This means that, in addition to being non-temporal or eternal in itself, there is a part of the primordial nature that can in fact be nourished by physical feelings of the world in the consequent nature. Whitehead really didn’t spell this out any more or, for that matter, very clearly. What is clear is that he wanted to affirm two things: that there’s a side of Gd’s primordial nature that is timeless and a side that is, in its own way, influential in the world in a gracious and providential way. Those who have tried to work this out more systematically (e.g. Marjorie Suchocki and John Cobb) have emphasized that Gd is indeed a whole, and that there’s something a bit phony about to sharply separating Gd’s various natures. If we think of Gd as a whole, then there’s no need to get too specific about which side of Gd does the ordering. Hope this helps just a little, Mandie.

Yes, the many of the world (all the concrescing subjects, once concresced) are among the novel data of God’s ongoing experience, and thus part of God. God, too, can be surprised.

Michael, thanks for your question. Eternal objects are not actual entities or actual occasions. They are pure potentials: real but not actual. Make sense?

This is such a good question, Leslie. Here’s a lyrical essay written by a novelist, Whiteheadian, and minister, Patricia Adams Farmer, that speaks a bit to the question of grief: https://www.openhorizons.org/grief-takes-a-road-trip1.html

A wonderful passage from Whitehead…filled with so many insights. Thanks for sharing,Michael.

I think you got it, Michael. Well said.

Mary Jo…great question and way of posing it. I think the arrows can go both ways, but I put them going from present to past for a reason. If you imagine yourself inside the process of concrescence in a given moment, your own experience will begin with what Whitehead calls “experience in the mode of causal efficacy.” This is a feeling of being influenced by the past actual world and, in some way, emerging out of that past actual world. Whitehead offers two examples: memory of the immediate past and bodily experience. Inasmuch as you are influenced by past events remembered and bodily feeling, the arrow would indeed, as you say, go from past to present. However, inasmuch as you are receiving that influence — that is, prehending the influence — you are feeling the past from the vantage point of present immediacy. In this case, the arrows would go from you, where the reception is occuring, to the past, as in the diagram. So…both directions. If I ever have a really talented graphic designer, I’ll redo it all in that way. Thanks again, Jay.

Dear Jamie,

Thanks for the good question. There is some question in Whitehead about the ontological status of the future. Is it “real” in some way, albeit as potentiality not actuality? Or is it simply nothing at all? If the latter, what is the status of this nothing, since it includes within it some kind of potential to be actualized? If you read PR carefully, Whitehead sometimes links it with the idea of an extensive continuum the regions of which will be embodied in the future, if not in the present or past. All that aside, Whitehead clearly thinks that actual entities, and by implication all actualities (nexuses) behave, not only on the basis of past influences but also on the basis of “future’ possibilities as felt through what, at some point, he calls anticipatory feelings. And he believes that, as actual entities concresce, these feelings are part of the concrescence. Thus, in the very unfolding of an entity, it feels and is beckoned by what ‘can be.’ Indeed, it feels beckoned by many “can be’s”: that is, many possible futures. One of them functions as the very way that the divine reality — God — is present in the actuality. The divine is present in the actuality as an ‘initial phase of the subjective aim’ that the entity at issue may or may not select in whatever it actualizes in the present. This means that, in a sense, God comes to the entity through and as a possible future felt through anticipation. And it means that there is indeed an Eros for actualizing futures within the very depths of the universe. Whitehead uses the word Eros in Adventures of Ideas as a name for God’s immanence in the world. Hope this helps.

What a story. Thanks for sharing, Michael. And, by the way, you were reading a good and very influential book yourself! Chogyam Trungpa’s ideas have influenced so many. May we, too, cut through spiritual materialism.

Such an enlightening, or might I say endarkening, poem by William Irwin Thompson, vividly illustrating and deepening the Whiteheadian idea that ‘individuals’ are never simple, because always composed of a ‘many.’ Illustrative of this idea is our own manyness: the fact that so many beings dwell within our own bodies. Who are the “we” in whose bodies they dwell? We may be one, but surely we are many, too – and always in process.

Yes, Thomas, you are right that there’s not an exact parallel between God in Whitehead, and other actual entities, inasmuch as God has a non-temporal side (primordial nature) and an everlasting side (consequent nature). So God is not really a momentary pulsation or concrescing subject the way that other actual entities are. Rather God is a non-temporal and everlasting concrescing subject: an actual entity but not an actual occasion. All actual occasions are actual entities; but one actual entity (God) is not itself an actual yet momentary occasion.

Michael, how interesting that you know of Charles Olson. I do, too. I’m a an of poetry, and know that he, in particular, was very influenced by Whitehead. I also can’t understand much of what he writes. Need help! As for negative capability, I do know the idea, and have read Keats’ account of it, along with others who interpret Keats. Here, too, I am a bit confused. As your time allows, please share your understanding of its meaning with me. Thanks.