Home > Positioning > Subjects > Philosophy of organism

Philosophy of organism

The philosophy of organism is Whitehead’s specific metaphysical system, articulated principally in Process and Reality (1929, from the Gifford Lectures of 1927–28). The name signals what the system is adequate to — a universe of organisms, alive and interrelated, not a universe of inert material particles. Before the system there is a diagnosis. Science and the Modern World (1925) names the bifurcation of nature — the split, inherited from Galileo and Descartes, between the nature physics measures (extension, motion, mass) and the nature we experience (colour, sound, warmth). For modern thought the first is real; the second is derivative, “merely subjective.” Together with the bifurcation Whitehead diagnoses the fallacy of misplaced concreteness — taking abstractions for concrete realities, treating the simplified objects of theory as if they were the things themselves.

The philosophy of organism is the cure: a speculative metaphysics in which the split never opens. It is distinct from the broader process philosophy tradition (which bundles Hegel, Bergson, and Whitehead at the level of process-as-primary-over-substance). The philosophy of organism is the Whiteheadian programme specifically — with its own categoreal apparatus, its own tradition, and its own contested reception.

The categoreal scheme

Process and Reality opens with a categoreal scheme of four parts: the Category of the Ultimate (creativity), eight Categories of Existence (including actual entities, prehensions, eternal objects, and propositions), twenty-seven Categories of Explanation (including the ontological principle), and nine Categoreal Obligations (constraints on how actual entities achieve their satisfaction). The scheme is dense and technical — a systematic attempt to build a vocabulary adequate to all elements of experience. The major concepts below carry the weight.

Actual entities (also called actual occasions): the final real things of which the world is made up. Not enduring substances but momentary events — each one a “drop of experience” that arises, achieves satisfaction, and perishes. Everything else — objects, persons, electrons — is derivative. Actual entities are the ontologically fundamental units.

Prehension. How one actual entity takes account of another. Not perception in the human sense but any mode of grasping, including, excluding, or being affected by what has already occurred. Positive prehensions include; negative prehensions exclude. Prehensions are the “concrete facts of relatedness” — the relations are not external to the entities; they constitute them.

Concrescence. The process by which an actual entity becomes. The drawing-together of past occasions, the unifying of prehensions into a new occasion of experience, the achievement of satisfaction. When concrescence is complete the entity perishes — becomes objectively immortal as datum for future occasions.

Eternal objects. Pure potentials — qualities, forms, possibilities that can “ingress” into actual entities. The colour red, the number three, a particular pattern of relations. Eternal objects have no efficacy of their own; they enter actuality only through actual entities. Often read as Whitehead’s Platonist residue; sometimes defended as a necessary feature of any account of stable form.

Nexus and society. A nexus is a set of actual entities related by mutual prehension; a society is a nexus with a defining characteristic that the entities pass on. A stone, a cell, a personal mind — each is a society of actual occasions sharing a common pattern across time. Endurance is the persistence of pattern through perishing occasions, not the persistence of an underlying substance.

Creativity. The ultimate category — “the universal of universals.” The principle by which the many become one and are increased by one. Creativity is not a thing in the world; it is what the world advances by. Not an entity but the principle that any entity instantiates.

God. Not the God of traditional theism. The system requires God to address how creativity is ordered — why novelty produces coherent worlds rather than chaos. The primordial nature is the ordering of all eternal objects — the structured field of possibilities each actual entity draws on. The consequent nature is God as shaped by the world’s experience — every achieved actuality is taken up and preserved. Each actual occasion receives an initial aim from the primordial nature: a lure toward its best possibility within its actual situation. Not coercion — a lure.

Key doctrines

The ontological principle. Every condition to which the process of becoming conforms has its reason in the character of some actual entity. There is nothing more ultimate than actual entities; abstractions don’t explain — only actual entities do.

Process and permanence. Each actual occasion perishes, but its achievement is objectified in subsequent occasions. The past is not lost but inherited. Permanence is the persistence of pattern; process and permanence are not opposites but co-implicated.

Reception

The reception runs on two largely distinct lines, with a partial bridge in recent decades.

Theological-American line

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) at the University of Chicago was Whitehead’s most systematic theological inheritor. His dipolar theism — God as in some respects eternal and immutable, in other respects temporal and passible — developed the God concept doctrinally in The Divine Relativity (1948). John B. Cobb Jr. (1925–2024) at Claremont brought process thought into direct conversation with Christian doctrine — Christology, ecclesiology, economic justice. David Ray Griffin (1939–2022), Cobb’s student, worked on the problem of evil and panentheism, and co-edited the standard corrected edition of Process and Reality (Free Press, 1978). The Center for Process Studies, founded 1973 by Cobb and Griffin at Claremont, remains the institutional home. Feminist process theology (Marjorie Suchocki and others) developed substantially from the 1970s onward.

This line takes Whitehead’s God seriously, develops it doctrinally, and kept the corpus continuously in print through the second half of the twentieth century when analytic philosophy had largely set him aside.

Continental-scholarly line

A distinct revival, beginning in the late 1990s and accelerating in the 2000s, reads Whitehead as a continental philosopher — adjacent to Deleuze, Bergson, and the speculative-realism debates rather than to process theology.

Isabelle Stengers is the central figure. Thinking with Whitehead (2002, English 2011) is widely credited with returning Whitehead to serious continental reading after decades of neglect outside process theology. Her reading emphasises Whitehead’s constructivism — speculative philosophy as a careful construction of concepts that civilises the abstractions inherited from modern thought. She takes the God concept seriously while reading it through the systematic constraint it serves rather than through traditional theism. Bruno Latour wrote the foreword and engaged Whitehead across his own later work. Steven Shaviro in Without Criteria (2009) reads Whitehead alongside Deleuze and defends a Whiteheadian panpsychism. Deleuze himself drew on Whitehead, particularly in The Fold (1988). Didier Debaise’s Nature as Event (2017) develops the Stengersian line further. The Lure of Whitehead (eds. Gaskill and Nocek, 2014) maps the contemporary revival with essays by Stengers, Latour, Shaviro, Graham Harman, and others.

A contested partition

Harman has argued that there is a substantive divide within the contemporary revival: Whitehead and Latour on one side, Deleuze and the Deleuzian Whiteheadians on the other. The dispute turns on whether entities are fully constituted by their relations or retain a withdrawn surplus beyond them. The question is live, not settled.

Contested aspects

God. The most contested aspect. Process theology (Hartshorne, Cobb, Griffin) develops the God concept as the foundation for a non-classical theism. Secular readers argue the system stands without it. Stengers reads God through the systematic function it serves without developing it theologically or excising it. All three positions are defensible within the literature.

Eternal objects. Whether they represent unwanted Platonist residue or a necessary feature of any account of stable form is a live question. The tension sits at the heart of how the system handles potentiality.

The speculative ambition. Whitehead’s project is unapologetically speculative — a categoreal scheme adequate to “any and all elements of human experience.” For some this ambition is the philosophy of organism’s strength; for others it is why mid-twentieth-century analytic philosophy set him aside and why the continental revival has been able to take him up.

Key works

Persons

Whitehead · Stengers · Bergson

See also: Process philosophy · Phenomenology · Pragmatism