Process Theory

In The Concept of Nature (1920) Whitehead named the bifurcation of nature. It is the split between physical nature as physics describes it (atoms, wavelengths, mechanisms) and experiential nature as we live it (colours, feelings, qualities). They form a dualism that never closes. Whitehead wanted to dissolve it and this grew into a whole process metaphysics — the philosophy of organism (Process and Reality, 1929) where experience is built in from the ground up.

Using the example of a note in a melody to illustrate this, the note prehends the notes that came before it and the silence around it — takes them up as its given past. Pitch, timbre, loudness ingress as pure potentials, giving it its qualitative feel. Phases of becoming narrow what this note will be — concrescence, the self-constitution of a determinate event. The note reaches satisfaction, fully this and nothing else. Then it perishes into objective immortality: ceased becoming, but available as data for the next note to prehend. The melody is not a single occasion but a society of them — a pattern sustained across many actual occasions, each taking up the satisfaction of its predecessors.

It’s forbidding as language — not only the terms but the fact that each is defined through the others. The actual occasion is the basic unit of the philosophy of organism: not a substance, not an enduring thing — a determinate event of self-constitution. Everything else is built from it. The approach has two parts: a real primitive doing genuine work, and a structured process flow built on it — concrescence phased, directional, determinate, with perishing into objective immortality as the link to the next occasion. Part of why it feels so strange is its lineage: Whitehead came out of the Principia Mathematica he co-wrote with Russell, and the system turns that analytical form — careful primitives, systematic construction — against analytical content, against the atomism and substance it set out to replace.

By making experience constitutive of the basic unit, the bifurcation never gets started. The character of the note and the sound frequencies are aspects of the same actual occasions. A process language that dissolves the bifurcation — within its own terms.

But the everyday subject still talks of colours, moods, atmospheres — that language game is untouched. The physicist still measures wavelengths, runs experiments, models in field equations — that language game is untouched too. Whitehead’s vocabulary appears in neither. It appears in a third — process metaphysics — which claims meta-status over both without replacing either. In practice there are three registers running in parallel, not one. The bifurcation people actually experience between phenomenal and scientific language is undisturbed.

There is no way to claim primacy without sneaking in some kind of outside view, and with it some representational tension for the other languages. The relational nature must be left unpacked in order to avoid that — which is what Rorty’s approach is: interactions between parallel language vocabularies. The pluralism isn’t argued for, then; it is what stays once the outside view is gone. But there is real merit in the process theory approach — where Whitehead is fairly unique. Can we have the languages in parallel, a minimal open relational approach like Rorty’s combined with a formal approach like Whitehead’s process theory? The next post in this seed series takes that up.

This post is part of the seed series. See also Alfred North Whitehead.

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