Process and Reality
An Essay in Cosmology — the Gifford Lectures 1927–28, in five parts
Tradition: Process philosophy / philosophy of organism
Reality consists of actual occasions of experience — drops of process — concrescent with their relations; God is the principle of concretion
Process and Reality is the most ambitious twentieth-century work of speculative metaphysics in English. Whitehead — the co-author with Russell of Principia Mathematica (1910–13) — develops a "philosophy of organism" in which the basic constituents of reality are not enduring substances but actual occasions of experience, drops of process that concresce by integrating their relations to past actualities and possibilities. God is described in two natures — primordial (the ordering of eternal objects) and consequent (the integration of all that has happened into divine experience). The work is famously difficult, partly because Whitehead invented much of its vocabulary, but its influence on twentieth-century process theology (Hartshorne, Cobb), philosophy of religion, and speculative philosophy more broadly is large.
Author
Editions cited
- Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition (David Ray Griffin & Donald W. Sherburne, Free Press, 1978)
- Process and Reality (Macmillan, 1929 — original Gifford edition)
School Embodiments
Process and Reality is *the* foundational text of twentieth-century process philosophy. Every later process thinker — Hartshorne, Cobb, Sherburne, Griffin — works in its conceptual frame.
"The actual world is a process, and the process is the becoming of actual entities." (Process and Reality, Part I ch. II §I)
Process theology — Hartshorne, Cobb, John B. Cobb Jr., Lewis Ford, Marjorie Suchocki — is the theological development of Whitehead's metaphysics. Process and Reality is its principal philosophical source.
"God is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things." (Process and Reality V.II)
Whitehead's doctrine that every actual occasion has a "physical pole" and a "mental pole" — that experience goes all the way down — has been read by contemporary panpsychists (Goff, Strawson) as a foundational text.
"The mental pole originates as conceptual counterpart of operations in the physical pole." (Process and Reality III.III)
Whitehead's ontology is thoroughly relational: each actual occasion is constituted by its prehensions of other occasions. Modern philosophical relationalism (especially in philosophy of physics) reads him as a major precursor.
"The many become one, and are increased by one." (Process and Reality II.II — the central category of the philosophy of organism)
Whitehead reads Spinoza warmly and treats his own cosmology as a partial alternative to substance-monism: actual occasions are the genuine plural substances, but they participate in a divine reality that is everywhere immanent.
"The reformed subjectivist principle adopted in these lectures is merely an old principle developed consistently." (Process and Reality II.II)
Internal Tensions
Process and Reality's technical vocabulary — "prehension," "concrescence," "objectification," "eternal object," "actual occasion" — makes it forbiddingly hard, and Whitehead's own usage is not always consistent across the five parts. The relation between the early mathematical Whitehead (Principia Mathematica) and the late metaphysical Whitehead (Process and Reality) has been disputed: continuous philosophical development, or a speculative turn that the analytic tradition largely declined to follow. Process theologians treat the late Whitehead as a working metaphysics; analytic philosophers have tended to treat it as an exotic exception.
I. Time
Time is the medium of concrescence — each actual occasion arises, integrates its data, achieves satisfaction, and perishes. Whitehead treats the temporal grain as quantised (atomistic) at the level of actual occasions: each occasion is a "drop" with no internal duration; continuous time is constructed from their succession. Time Grain is Discrete in this precise Whiteheadian sense.
Attributes
II. Space
Spatial extension is constituted by the relational structure of co-occurrent actual occasions. Space is relational rather than substantival, three-dimensional in our cosmic epoch (Whitehead leaves open that other cosmic epochs might have different geometries).
Attributes
III. Matter
There are no enduring material substances — only societies of actual occasions with sufficient internal order to count as ordinary objects. Matter is relational, conserved (the data of perished occasions are objectively immortal in subsequent occasions), and locally interactive.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Every actual occasion is an experiencing subject; observation goes all the way down. Human observers are highly complex societies of occasions, embodied and active. Knowledge is immediate (each occasion prehends its world directly) but limited to what its standpoint permits. The metaphysical agency is personal: Whitehead's God is genuinely an actual entity, with primordial and consequent natures, participating in but not coercing the world.
Attributes
V. Energy
Energy in Whitehead's sense is the "creative advance" — the principle of novelty by which each occasion arises from the many of its predecessors. Substantival in the precise sense of being a real metaphysical principle, conserved across the cosmic process, and irreversibly directional.
Attributes
VI. Information
God's consequent nature is the substantival preservation of all that has happened — "the dead are immortal because they live for ever in the consequent nature of God" (V.II). Personal information is conserved in this divine experience after the perishing of the temporal occasions that composed the person.
Attributes
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Personas with the nearest attribute fingerprint
Historical figures whose own classification on the same six-dimensional grid lands closest to this work's. Computed by attribute-agreement on coordinates both address.
Computed school proximity
The work's attribute fingerprint scored against all schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated embodiments above.
How Process and Reality resolves each dilemma
48 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 25 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 9 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas · 3 distinctive
Persistence, the future, and the direction of becoming.
3 mainstream positions
Matter · 7 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
What stuff is — fundamental, relational, or appearance.
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 5 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.