An Overview: The Actual Entity, Chapter One

Text: Whitehead, Alfred North and Donald W. Sherburne. 1981. A Key to Whitehead's Process and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Process and Reality is Whitehead’s attempt at describing reality and this description contains ‘the becoming, the being and the relatedness of actual entities’ (p. 7), i.e. what a caterpillar is (being), what a caterpillar can be (becoming), and how a caterpillar can affect a white mulberry leaf (relation).

Immediately, one is curious as to what ‘actual entities’ are. Actual entities (where actual is used in the sense of ‘existent’) are the generically uniform, but specifically different, vital microcosmic units that compose reality — the building blocks (if blocks sounds too blocky to be palatable to Whitehead, let’s say processes) of Whitehead’s ontology. 

Given that actual entities are dynamic rather than static, what gives unity to each of them is called ‘concrescence’, the internal constitution of actual entities. What Whitehead calls the diversity of the many, must therefore be temporally diverse and yet successive. Concrescence is then nothing but the process that is to be understood as a unit of reality, a process that is striving towards ‘satisfaction’.

Whitehead’s actual entities seem like Leibniz’s monads, but they differ from them in so far as they are constantly in the process of becoming. Also, they are not windowless as in the case of Leibniz; in fact they are all windows, and in that sense every actual entity is a ‘mode of the process of feeling the world’ (p. 8).

Experience of the world from the available data (derived from the objectification of other actual occasion), then constitutes every actual entity. The transition of the objective data into subjectivity is termed as ‘feeling’. Feeling is the process of the absorption of the so-called ‘others’ of the universe, of transforming the external into a form of internality. 

An actual entity is a product of its interaction with various elements of the universe. Its being is constituted by what the universe is for it. It appropriates some of these elements, and excludes others. Whitehead’s cosmology is then absolutely relational, and the concrete and definite bonds of relatedness are called prehensions. A subject prehends a data by giving it a subjective form (subject, data and the subjective form then being three factors of prehension). Prehensions may be positive or negative, depending on whether the subject excludes or includes the datum. The case of inclusion is called feeling. An actual entity is the subject of feelings.

The initial datum, which we have been discussing, is nothing but another actual entity and the moment of its objectification occurs when it becomes a feeling for the subject. The feeling is constituted of five factors (p.12): (a) the subject which feels (b) the initial data which are to be felt (c) the elimination in virtue of negative prehensions (d) the objective datum which is felt (e) the subjective form, which is how that subject feels the objective datum.

The politics of actual entities governs how one entity will be objectified for the other, i.e. how much power it holds over the other. Feelings are the manner in which elements of nature immortalize themselves.

Every actual entity has a point of termination which is concomitant with the attainment of what Whitehead calls satisfaction. When an actual entity has successfully established a concrete relationship with every other entity in the universe, either positively or negatively, it is satisfied and complete. This completing is also a termination of the process. In every phase of the process of concrescence, something new is added to the process until it is completely satisfied. This integration is essential to the character of actual entities, and there is a telos towards which they move — the final cause being a complete determination, a definiteness. To attain this definiteness, completeness and satisfaction is to become objectively immortal. Now, even though its own existence has evaporated, the actual entity can still affect other entities, and showcase its power.

What is central to the system of Whitehead, is the relatedness of actualities. Things that have seemingly perished, are absorbed into the living and that is how reality continues to become. Mr Caterpillar is immortalized in becoming a butterfly. Each actual entity has a potentiality for process and must perfect itself. Once perfect, and satisfied, the entity seems to close-up. And yet, in spite of the dead, there is no real death for the satisfied entity is objectively immortal — a being beyond itself, for the future, potentiality.