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The Green Leaf and the Round Ball

Whitehead's Reformed Subjectivist Principle
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The subjectivist principle is that the whole universe consists of elements disclosed in the analysis of the experiences of subjects. Process is the becoming of experience. It follows that the philosophy of organism entirely accepts the subjectivist bias of modern philosophy...The difficulties of all schools of modern philosophy lie in the fact that, having accepted the subjectivist principle, they continue to use philosoph­ical categories derived from another point of view. These categories are not wrong, but they deal with abstractions unsuitable for metaphysical use...

The notions of the ‘green leaf’ and of the ‘round ball’ are at the base of traditional metaphysics. They have generated two miscon­ceptions: one is the concept of vacuous actuality, void of subjective ex­perience; and the other is the concept of quality inherent in substance. 

​In their proper character, as high abstractions, both of these notions are of the utmost pragmatic use. In fact, language has been formed chiefly to express such concepts. It is for this reason that language, in its ordinary usages, penetrates but a short distance into the principles of metaphysics. Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.

- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality, 166 (emphasis mine)

Explanation

The problem with the green leaf and the round ball is not that they exist but that we have built a metaphysical perspective out of them and come to see the world, and even our own experience, through their image.

Consider the green leaf. Traditional metaphysics treats it as a substance that “has” qualities. The leaf may be green, brown, or yellow, but it is assumed to remain the same underlying thing regardless of those changing properties. Whitehead finds this misleading. For him, qualities like greenness are not detachable additions but expressions of relational processes. The green leaf is what it is only because of its relationships—sunlight, water, soil, atmosphere, season. To imagine the green leaf as a fixed substance beneath its changing colors is to ignore the fact that it is constituted by these relations.

Consider also the round ball—a billiard ball, for example. It is solid, round, hard, able to move and collide. Such a ball is often conceived as an inert object with no interiority, no subjectivity, no feeling, no creativity. It would be what Whitehead calls a “vacuous actuality.”

But in truth, he argues, there are no such inert actualities. Every actual entity, even a quantum event in an atom, is an occasion of experience with an interior dimension. Each has something like subjectivity or feeling, and some degree of self-creativity and self-enjoyment. It is alive with “subjective immediacy.” Even what we think of as lifeless objects—rocks and billiard balls—are aggregate expressions, or nexuses, of such actualities. To imagine the world on the analogy of inert round balls is to drain it of interiority, which Whitehead insists is everywhere.

Whitehead’s alternative is what he calls the “reformed subjectivist principle.” The principle conforms to the turn toward subjectivity that Whitehead believes lies at the heart of modern Western philosophy since Descartes, but it is reformed in to ways,

First, it does not see subjectivity as limited to human beings. Subjectivity is present in every genuine actuality, however minute, each one prehending the world and being prehended in return. All public matters of fact, all nexus, are aggregates of subjectivity. And, second, the subjects themselves are not self-contained entities to which qualities are added, but rather moments of concrescence whose prehensions or feelings are acts of being related to the world. They would not exist without a world to be related to.
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What things truly are, then, is not inert substances with added qualities, nor vacuous round balls lacking in interiority, but acts of subjective becoming through relationships. The best analogy for understanding the universe is not the green leaf with added greenness or the round ball without inner life, but our own lived experience in the here and now, where we receive the world, respond, and emerge as subjects. The very world we receive is likewise filled with subjectivity: “apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.” 

This means that even green leaves and round balls are aggregate-expressions of subjective energy and relationality. The greenness of a leaf is part of the leaf and also an expression of its real internal constitution. And the solidity of a round ball is likewise an expression of such energy and relationality. Whitehead's reformed subjectivist principle is an invitation to see them, too, in a new and more organic light.

​- Jay McDaniel