Process As the Unifying Principle of Physical Reality (Part 1.1)

I.  Process 

Process consists of two kinds of fluency.  The first kind of fluency, the first phase of Process, is what Whitehead terms “concrescence.”  Concrescence is the coming to be of an actuality from mere multiplicity; “the process in which the universe of many things acquires an individual unity in a determinate relegation of each item of the ‘many’ to its subordination in the constitution of the novel ‘one’.” [320] Generally, concrescence is the unification of diverse entities into a novel whole.  Particularly, it is the microscopic process which constitutes every actual entity. 

Concrescence is the process through which a merely conceptual entity becomes an actuality.  “Actuality,” Whitehead states, “means nothing else than this ultimate entry into the concrete, in abstraction from which there is mere nonentity.” [321]  It is through concrescence that an occasion gains actual existence.  Ultimately, however, concrescence is the thing itself.  It is “the real internal constitution of a particular existent.” [320] Whitehead goes further to say: “There are not ‘the concrescence’ and the ‘novel thing’: when we analyze the novel thing, we find nothing but the concrescence.” [321] 

There is, however, a tension which resides between the statements we have made regarding concrescence.  We have said that concrescence is both the process through which an entity gains actuality and the entity itself.  Initially, these seem to be opposing ideas, one being a condition of a subject, the other, the subject itself.  In the philosophy of organism, these ideas are unified.  An entity’s process of becoming actual, of creating itself, is the entity itself. 

The “novel thing” is an instance of concrescence, something new arising from the unification of a preexisting “many” into a unified “one.”  Any thing at all we may choose can serve as an example of a “novel thing,” as any thing we may choose, if it has actuality, will be the novel result of an antecedent concrescence, without which it would not have actuality.  In this way, when we speak of a “novel thing,” we are speaking of any existing entity or, what is equivalent, any “actual occasion.”  

Whitehead uses the word ‘occasion’ to connote an existent which is both spatial and temporal.  Whereas the term ‘entity’ carries with it the meaning of a spatial object, ‘occasion’ elicits in the reader the idea of temporality, of an “event” existing in time.  Analysis of an actual occasion reveals “operations transforming entities which are individually alien, into components of a complex which is concretely one.” [322] ‘Feeling’ is the generic term Whitehead gives for these operations.

‘Feeling,’ as Whitehead uses it, does not imply, as it normally does for us, the presence of a conscious, living being; feeling is present in everything, in the simplest instances of concrescence, while consciousness is present only in very complex organisms designed for such activity.  Whitehead uses the word ‘feeling’ in speaking of these operations to connote the presence of a “subject.” The reason Whitehead uses common words in the peculiar way that he does to give coherence to his system.  If complex organisms, such as humans, have the ability to “feel” in the normal sense of the word, the basic elements of things must have characteristics out of which such an ability can arise.  Otherwise, the elements of things will be of a completely different nature from the things arising from them.  Any system which then tries to explain complex entities based on the analysis of fundamental elements which are of an entirely different nature will be incoherent.  It is for this reason that I believe Whitehead chooses to use words such as ‘feeling’ to speak of the operations which constitute actual occasions.

In another sense, “feeling” connotes a sort of subjective “bringing in” of things, of a passive activity by which an entity makes itself aware of another entity.  This, I think, is the foremost meaning of Whitehead’s use of the word ‘feeling.’  

In the formal constitution of an actual entity, there are three stages of feeling.  The first of these stages is the responsive stage.  This phase “is the phase of pure reception of the actual world in its guise of objective datum for aesthetic synthesis.” [323] Here “there is the mere reception of the actual world as a multiplicity of private centers of feeling.” [323] This stage is the completely passive reception of a preexisting world of actual entities. 

Though the use of the word ‘feeling’ implies a “subject,” “the feelings [of this stage] are felt as belonging to external centers, and are not absorbed into the private immediacy.” [323] These feelings are the original elements of the formal constitution of an actual entity and have a vector quality  “from outside, to inside.”  They are the bare “sensations” of an impersonal external world.