A Different Kind of Permanence
Whitehead's Philosophy as a Footnote to Plato
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato...The train of thought in these lectures is Platonic...The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
Whitehead remarks that the “train of thought” in his philosophy is Platonic. By the things that are eternal, he means, among other things, the pure, timeless potentialities—the eternal objects—that give form to the world of flux. Such abstractions include particular shades of color, mathematical relations, and even emotions, which he calls eternal objects of the “subjective species.”
In turning to these timeless realities, Whitehead is anything but a “process philosopher” in a careless or shallow sense. He certainly affirms that the world is a process of becoming, and he insists that we best recognize this—not merely resigning ourselves to impermanence as a concession to finitude but welcoming it as an adventure in creativity. For him, every moment of experience has value for itself, an intrinsic worth, even as its immediacy perishes. Yet alongside this affirmation of process, Whitehead also affirms the eternal, the changeless, and the everlasting. He speaks of:
He also affirms the legitimacy of religious feelings that seek something abiding, something more than flux. Religion, he says, is not only about adventure but also, and rightly, about permanence. About seeking something that abides as the days pass by:. As the hymn puts it that he approvingly quotes in Process and Reality: "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide." (PR, 209)
Here Whitehead is Platonic in spirit. He insists that beings are indeed becomings, that their very being is their coming into being: “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (Process and Reality, 23). But this becoming participates in the eternal; it arises through such participation: “The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things that are eternal” (Process and Reality, 40).
A Living Permanence
What distinguishes Whitehead from Plato, however, is that he refuses to think of permanence as static. He envisions instead a living permanence. The primordial nature of God is not inert but filled with “appetitive vision”—a non-temporal happening alive with spontaneity and feeling. And it is complemented by the consequent nature of God, everlastingly fluent, preserving the objective immortality of the past and weaving it into something perpetually new. Permanence here is vital, dynamic, and deeply Platonic in aspiration, yet different in tone.
Additionally, the finite world itself is permanent in its ongoing influence in the future, and this influences is not merely a matter of future events conforming to the past. It is a matter of the feelings of the past actual world having a kind of power to influence the future. Past events live on, not simply in being remembered but in have power.
And then, of course, there are the eternal objects. For Plato, the Forms included the ideals of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. For Whitehead, eternal objects are not necessarily ideals but forms of definiteness—shapes, colors, emotions abstracted from their embodiments. He believed in ideals, but they may be better understood in his system as propositions: lures for feeling that draw from God, not pure potentials but relevant ones. Whitehead calls them "impure" potentials because they are linked with the finite world. He speaks of them as matters of fact in potential determination. (PR, 22) This does not sound like Plato's Forms.
The differences go further. In Plato’s philosophy the Forms are more real than the temporal world, which, the the metaphor of the cave, Plato likens to mere shadows of true reality. Whitehead, by contrast, does not treat potentialities as more real than the actual world. Agency lies not in eternal objects but in the actual entities that actualize them. Eternal objects ingress into actual entities, but it is the entities that decide. Participation, for Whitehead, is active and creative rather than passive reflection. IF we ask why things happen as they do, we cannot appeal to eternal objects. We must appeal to the decisions of actual entities. This is Whitehead's ontological principle.
Still, Whitehead never ceased to admire the Greeks. They were, he said, “speculative, adventurous, eager for novelty.” He regarded his own philosophy as an extension of their spirit and acknowledged Plato as the one who asked the questions we are still right to ask. It is no accident that Whitehead could describe the history of Western philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato.”
His own philosophy is one of those footnotes—a footnote that has become a tradition in its own right, now known as process philosophy. In circles, it may be as easily described as a kind of neo-Platonism, although not of the traditional kind. It is a process neo-Platonism, emphasizing a different kind of permanence - one that includes equal reference to the flow, flux, and value of the temporal world.
In what follows, I offer three extended quotes from Whitehead, lending support to what I've said above.
I then turn, in an appendix, to the implications of his thought for contemporary debates about education and the classics. My suggestion is that Whitehead’s philosophy is at once conservative and liberal, attentive both to permanence and to process. For that very reason, it may provide a bridge in our polarized age. His Platonic “footnote,” read afresh, may have special relevance today.
- Jay McDaniel
In turning to these timeless realities, Whitehead is anything but a “process philosopher” in a careless or shallow sense. He certainly affirms that the world is a process of becoming, and he insists that we best recognize this—not merely resigning ourselves to impermanence as a concession to finitude but welcoming it as an adventure in creativity. For him, every moment of experience has value for itself, an intrinsic worth, even as its immediacy perishes. Yet alongside this affirmation of process, Whitehead also affirms the eternal, the changeless, and the everlasting. He speaks of:
- a timeless dimension of God, the primordial nature, which he describes as a “primordial permanence.”
- the objective immortality of past events, which, though their immediacy perishes, continue to exert influence in the temporal world.
- the objective immortality of those same events in the ongoing life of God, the consequent nature.
- the everlasting life of God, understood not as timeless but as divine temporality without beginning or end.
- a realm of eternal objects—felt in God’s primordial nature and actualized in the world.
He also affirms the legitimacy of religious feelings that seek something abiding, something more than flux. Religion, he says, is not only about adventure but also, and rightly, about permanence. About seeking something that abides as the days pass by:. As the hymn puts it that he approvingly quotes in Process and Reality: "Abide with me, fast falls the eventide." (PR, 209)
Here Whitehead is Platonic in spirit. He insists that beings are indeed becomings, that their very being is their coming into being: “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is” (Process and Reality, 23). But this becoming participates in the eternal; it arises through such participation: “The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things that are eternal” (Process and Reality, 40).
A Living Permanence
What distinguishes Whitehead from Plato, however, is that he refuses to think of permanence as static. He envisions instead a living permanence. The primordial nature of God is not inert but filled with “appetitive vision”—a non-temporal happening alive with spontaneity and feeling. And it is complemented by the consequent nature of God, everlastingly fluent, preserving the objective immortality of the past and weaving it into something perpetually new. Permanence here is vital, dynamic, and deeply Platonic in aspiration, yet different in tone.
Additionally, the finite world itself is permanent in its ongoing influence in the future, and this influences is not merely a matter of future events conforming to the past. It is a matter of the feelings of the past actual world having a kind of power to influence the future. Past events live on, not simply in being remembered but in have power.
And then, of course, there are the eternal objects. For Plato, the Forms included the ideals of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. For Whitehead, eternal objects are not necessarily ideals but forms of definiteness—shapes, colors, emotions abstracted from their embodiments. He believed in ideals, but they may be better understood in his system as propositions: lures for feeling that draw from God, not pure potentials but relevant ones. Whitehead calls them "impure" potentials because they are linked with the finite world. He speaks of them as matters of fact in potential determination. (PR, 22) This does not sound like Plato's Forms.
The differences go further. In Plato’s philosophy the Forms are more real than the temporal world, which, the the metaphor of the cave, Plato likens to mere shadows of true reality. Whitehead, by contrast, does not treat potentialities as more real than the actual world. Agency lies not in eternal objects but in the actual entities that actualize them. Eternal objects ingress into actual entities, but it is the entities that decide. Participation, for Whitehead, is active and creative rather than passive reflection. IF we ask why things happen as they do, we cannot appeal to eternal objects. We must appeal to the decisions of actual entities. This is Whitehead's ontological principle.
Still, Whitehead never ceased to admire the Greeks. They were, he said, “speculative, adventurous, eager for novelty.” He regarded his own philosophy as an extension of their spirit and acknowledged Plato as the one who asked the questions we are still right to ask. It is no accident that Whitehead could describe the history of Western philosophy as a “series of footnotes to Plato.”
His own philosophy is one of those footnotes—a footnote that has become a tradition in its own right, now known as process philosophy. In circles, it may be as easily described as a kind of neo-Platonism, although not of the traditional kind. It is a process neo-Platonism, emphasizing a different kind of permanence - one that includes equal reference to the flow, flux, and value of the temporal world.
In what follows, I offer three extended quotes from Whitehead, lending support to what I've said above.
I then turn, in an appendix, to the implications of his thought for contemporary debates about education and the classics. My suggestion is that Whitehead’s philosophy is at once conservative and liberal, attentive both to permanence and to process. For that very reason, it may provide a bridge in our polarized age. His Platonic “footnote,” read afresh, may have special relevance today.
- Jay McDaniel
Extended Quotes
Western Philosophy is a series of Footnotes to Plato
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them. His personal endowments, his wide opportunities for experience at a great period of civilization, his inheritance of an intellectual tradition not yet stiffened by excessive systematization, have made his writings† an inexhaustible mine of suggestion.
Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. But I do mean more: I mean that if we had to render Plato’s general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or ‘participation’) of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence. The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, 39-40
Thus in one sense by stating my belief that the train of thought in these lectures is Platonic, I am doing no more than expressing the hope that it falls within the European tradition. But I do mean more: I mean that if we had to render Plato’s general point of view with the least changes made necessary by the intervening two thousand years of human experience in social organization, in aesthetic attainments, in science, and in religion, we should have to set about the construction of a philosophy of organism. In such a philosophy the actualities constituting the process of the world are conceived as exemplifying the ingression (or ‘participation’) of other things which constitute the potentialities of definiteness for any actual existence. The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal.
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, 39-40
The Greeks were Speculative, Adventurous, and Eager for Novelty
"During the last six centuries, the culture of Europe has guided itself by example. The Greeks and Romans at their best period have been taken as the standard of civilization. We have aimed at reproducing the excellencies of these societies—preferably the society of Athens in its prime. These standards have served the Western races well. But the procedure has its disadvantages. It is backward looking, and it is limited to one type of social excellence.
Today the world is passing into a new stage of its existence. New knowledge, and new technologies have altered the proportions of things. The particular example of an ancient society sets too static an ideal, and neglects the whole range of opportunity. It is really not sufficient to direct attention to the best that has been said and done in the ancient world. The result is static, repressive, and promotes a decadent habit of mind. Also I suggest that the Greeks themselves were not backward looking, or static. Compared to their neighbours, they were singularly unhistorical. They were speculative, adventurous, eager for novelty. The most un-Greek thing that we can do, is to copy the Greeks. For emphatically they were not copyists."
AN Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 273
The Primordial Permanence of God, the Fluency of the World
God and the World stand over against each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that appetitive vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn apart: each is all in all. Thus each temporal occasion embodies God, and is embodied in God. In God’s nature, permanence is primordial and flux is derivative from the World: in the World’s nature, flux is primordial and permanence is derivative from God. Also the World’s nature is a primordial datum for God; and God’s nature is a primordial datum for the World. Creation achieves the reconciliation of permanence and flux when it has reached its final term which is everlastingness—the Apotheosis of the World.
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, 348
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, 348
Appendix:
Implications for Education
Imagine, along with many who seek a recovery of classical education in the West, that the purpose of higher education is to provide a setting in which students can ask the big questions--What is true? What is good? What is beautiful?—through a careful study of the great texts. This was the conviction of Leo Strauss, the German-American philosopher who left such a mark on conservative intellectual life. Strauss argued that modern philosophy, beginning with Machiavelli, had turned away from the pursuit of truth and virtue, embracing instead skepticism, relativism, and a will to power. As a remedy, Strauss sought to recover the enduring wisdom of ancient thinkers, especially Plato and Aristotle. For him, the classics were not dusty artifacts but living teachers—prompts for confronting perennial human questions.
Where is Whitehead in all of this? He, too, was steeped in the classics and famously remarked, as noted above, that Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato. He, too, believed that modern thought had lost its grip on transcendent ideals, reducing nature to a lifeless commodity and philosophy to ideology under what he called “scientific materialism.” Like Strauss, he sought to recover the dignity of thought and the reality of value—not only for the sake of philosophy but for the future of civilization itself. Indeed, Whitehead believed that his own philosophy, a philosophy of organism, was a contemporary rendition of the Platonic point of view: "The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal."
And yet, Whitehead was not a conservative, if that means being affixed to inherited ways of thinking at the expense of being open to the future. He believed that the universe is a creative advance into novelty, and that participating in things eternal is also, at the same time, an encounter with a not-yet-decided future. He writes: "The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe." (Adventures of Ideas, 274) And he thought that the Greeks would agree. They themselves were “speculative, adventurous, and eager for novelty.” They were not copyists.
In short, Whitehead urged an engagement with the classics not only as a way of asking the big questions, but also as a way of catching the spirit of adventure. In this sense, he embodied a philosophy that was both conservative and liberal. He was conservative in insisting that philosophy cannot ignore the enduring questions that animated Plato and Aristotle. But he was liberal in insisting that “being” itself is becoming. Reality is not a static order but a dynamic process—an unfolding in which every actuality is both rooted in the past and open to the future. At the center of this rootedness and openness is our own actuality, our own existence. "Being," for Whitehead, is not a noun or even a verb. It is how we live in the immediacy of our lives. As he puts it: "How an entity becomes constitutes what that entity is."
Education faithful to reality, therefore, must be rooted in the howness. It must be both grounded and forward-looking. Conservatism, at its best, honors tradition, stability, and the enduring questions. Liberalism, at its best, affirms openness, novelty, and the courage to experiment. Whitehead’s philosophy shows that these impulses need not be at war. In fact, they belong together. To live well is to live with both roots and wings—to be nourished by the wisdom of the past while being open to the lure of the future. And both are Greek!
In our polarized moment, it is tempting to imagine conservatism and liberalism as enemies: one clinging to the past, the other chasing the future. Whitehead invites us to think differently. The task is not to choose between roots or wings, but to cultivate both. An education that is truly alive will be conservative in honoring wisdom and liberal in seeking novelty. It will form citizens who can conserve what is good even as they improvise what is new. It will be faithful to the past without being bound by it, and open to the future without being rootless.
That, finally, is the promise of Whitehead’s process vision: a civilization and an education that conserve by transforming, that remain faithful to the Greeks by refusing to copy them, and that remind us that to be is always to become.
Where is Whitehead in all of this? He, too, was steeped in the classics and famously remarked, as noted above, that Western philosophy is but a series of footnotes to Plato. He, too, believed that modern thought had lost its grip on transcendent ideals, reducing nature to a lifeless commodity and philosophy to ideology under what he called “scientific materialism.” Like Strauss, he sought to recover the dignity of thought and the reality of value—not only for the sake of philosophy but for the future of civilization itself. Indeed, Whitehead believed that his own philosophy, a philosophy of organism, was a contemporary rendition of the Platonic point of view: "The things which are temporal arise by their participation in the things which are eternal."
And yet, Whitehead was not a conservative, if that means being affixed to inherited ways of thinking at the expense of being open to the future. He believed that the universe is a creative advance into novelty, and that participating in things eternal is also, at the same time, an encounter with a not-yet-decided future. He writes: "The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the universe." (Adventures of Ideas, 274) And he thought that the Greeks would agree. They themselves were “speculative, adventurous, and eager for novelty.” They were not copyists.
In short, Whitehead urged an engagement with the classics not only as a way of asking the big questions, but also as a way of catching the spirit of adventure. In this sense, he embodied a philosophy that was both conservative and liberal. He was conservative in insisting that philosophy cannot ignore the enduring questions that animated Plato and Aristotle. But he was liberal in insisting that “being” itself is becoming. Reality is not a static order but a dynamic process—an unfolding in which every actuality is both rooted in the past and open to the future. At the center of this rootedness and openness is our own actuality, our own existence. "Being," for Whitehead, is not a noun or even a verb. It is how we live in the immediacy of our lives. As he puts it: "How an entity becomes constitutes what that entity is."
Education faithful to reality, therefore, must be rooted in the howness. It must be both grounded and forward-looking. Conservatism, at its best, honors tradition, stability, and the enduring questions. Liberalism, at its best, affirms openness, novelty, and the courage to experiment. Whitehead’s philosophy shows that these impulses need not be at war. In fact, they belong together. To live well is to live with both roots and wings—to be nourished by the wisdom of the past while being open to the lure of the future. And both are Greek!
In our polarized moment, it is tempting to imagine conservatism and liberalism as enemies: one clinging to the past, the other chasing the future. Whitehead invites us to think differently. The task is not to choose between roots or wings, but to cultivate both. An education that is truly alive will be conservative in honoring wisdom and liberal in seeking novelty. It will form citizens who can conserve what is good even as they improvise what is new. It will be faithful to the past without being bound by it, and open to the future without being rootless.
That, finally, is the promise of Whitehead’s process vision: a civilization and an education that conserve by transforming, that remain faithful to the Greeks by refusing to copy them, and that remind us that to be is always to become.