One purpose of Open Horizons is to serve as a repository of individual pages which will enable people to master the technical dimensions of Whitehead's philosophy. 

​Such mastery is not at all necessary for those who are part of the process movement.  Understanding core ideas (see Twenty Key Ideas) is entirely sufficient.  Ideas such as the intrinsic value of all life, the radical interconnectedness of all things, the idea that something like subjectivity goes all the way down into the depths of matter, the idea that there is a continuous creativity of which all things are expressions, and (for many) the idea that the whole universe unfolds within the larger context of an evolving unity (God) who feels the feelings of all things and provides opportunities for hope and adventure.  These ideas are "Whiteheadian" in spirit.  What is most important is that they gain a foothold on earth in practical actions and loving relationships. 

​Nevertheless, for some, a mastery of Whitehead's ideas is also important.  If you are among them, this page is for you.  It is an excerpt from John Cobb on three key ideas: nexus, society, and living person.  Bottom line?  Empty space and mountains and souls are all alive with subjectivity in aggregate form; they emerge out of their relations with their pasts and yet embody a creativity that is not reducible to the past; and your experience, as an individual soul, is as real as the mountains and space.  All are expressions of 'occasions of experience.'

- Jay McDaniel, October 2020

Empty Space, Mountains and Souls

John Cobb on Whitehead's Concepts
​of ​Nexūs, Societies and Living Persons

an extended excerpt from the Whitehead Wordbook
published with permission from John Cobb
​and gratitude to Process Century Press
​

In the categories of existence Whitehead pairs subjective forms and “nexūs.” Subjective forms are the way occasions feel the past. They are “private matters of fact.” Nexūs he identifies with “public matters of fact.”

A nexus is composed of multiple occasions that are together with one another. My desk is a nexus of molecular occasions, or, if there are no molecular or atomic occasions, of quanta of energy. All the objects of ordinary experience are nexūs: sticks and stones, planets and stars, mountains and trees. So also are what we usually call events. But the denotation of the term extends even more widely. The air in the room and the atmosphere of the entire planet are both nexūs. So are the occasions that are together in an “empty space.” There is a nexus of all the occasions that constitute the entirety of the past of any occasion, that is, its actual world. So extensive is the application of the term that it may be easier to understand it by identifying that to which it does not apply.

First, a single occasion is not a nexus. A nexus is a plurality of occasions bound together by their internal relations. Second, a class or set, such as the set of all red objects, or the set of all poodles, is not a nexus. Internal relations among these entities do not enter into their identification as a class. The idea of a nexus is very important for translating back and forth between Whitehead and most other philosophical systems. What many others call “actual entities,” Whitehead calls “nexūs.” This is most obvious in relation to philosophies that stay close to ordinary language and treat the objects of everyday experience as actual entities. But it is true also of most process philosophies, which take events as primary. Most of the events that are so treated are, for Whitehead, nexūs, that is, they are composed of multiple actual occasions.

A nexus functions, and therefore exists, in two ways. Whitehead calls them “objective” and “formal.” As objective the nexus exists for the observer. Tables and chairs are objective nexūs for human beings as are most of what in ordinary language we speak of as things or objects. But the nexus consists of individual actual occasions, which do not exist only for observers. They exist also formally in themselves as processes of appropriating the past and thereby constituting themselves.

A nexus also may be spoken of in terms of its formal constitution. There is much in the nexus formally that is not present for any one percipient subject objectively. Whitehead sometimes distinguishes the “initial data” of an occasion from the “objective datum.” The initial data constitute the prehended nexus formally, that is, with all the features of all the entities intact. The objective datum of the occasion as a whole is the way the new occasion prehends the nexus. Much of the richness of the nexus understood in the formal way is lost in its objectification. This is also relevant for translation between Whitehead’s philosophy and those of others. Some philosophers take an actual entity to be a nexus they experience as they experience it. Some want to go behind what the world is for observers to the world that is observed, as it is in itself, that is, to the nexus in its formal completeness.

Societies and Empty Space

Societies are to nexūs much as actual occasions are to actual entities. Most of the nexūs we have considered are societies. That is, they have “social order.” But there are also “nonsocial” nexūs, which means, nexūs with no social order. The chief example of a nexus with no social order is found in “empty space.” Empty space is not empty of actual occasions. In Whitehead’s view something is going on everywhere, even in a vacuum. There is energy there. But in empty space nothing endures. Accordingly there is nothing that moves and nothing that can be measured. The relations of an occasion in empty space to earlier occasions are just as important to its existence as are relations to past occasions in the occasions that make up societies, but they do not generate social order.

Empty space is space that is empty of societies. Societies come into being when some characteristic of one occasion is inherited by other occasions. The continuance of that characteristic through time makes of the multiplicity of occasions that inherit and transmit this characteristic a “society.” The members of a society have something in common, and unlike members of a set or class, they share this characteristic by virtue of their feelings of antecedent members of the same society.

Societies endure through time, whereas actual occasions only occur and fade into the past. Accordingly, societies can change location, as individual actual occasions cannot. Measurement of how they function is possible.  Whitehead sometimes uses the term society when speaking of what we normally call human societies. A human being may belong to a variety of societies. He gives the example of persons who know Greek. They constitute a society because even though many of them do not know one another, they share a common characteristic derived from other members of the society. Many small towns or city neighborhoods are also societies, in that the members share characteristics derived from other members of the town or neighborhood.

However, Whitehead uses the term “society” more often in relation to nonhuman organisms, inanimate objects, or nexūs of events. These are of many varieties.

Enduring Objects or Personally Ordered Societies and Corpuscular Societies

Conceptually, the simplest form of society is one in which there is just one member at a time. Our own individual experience of ourselves is of this sort. One experience is followed by another and that by another, yet each is strongly connected to its predecessors. This is what is meant by a personally ordered society. In contrast to individual occasions in empty space, which we saw are lacking in social order, personal order constitutes a society that endures through time. It is, therefore, also called an “enduring object.” Its endurance may be for a second or for a million years.

Although in its strictest definition, all enduring objects would be personally ordered societies, in Whitehead’s actual usage, the term is sometimes used for macroscopic objects that endure even if the entities that are serially ordered are not actual occasions but societies of such entities. He refers to molecules as enduring objects. If we take his definition strictly, this would support the judgment that at any moment there is a single molecular occasion. But he also, at other points, indicates that molecules are “structured societies.” One conclusion could be that Whitehead thought that a structured society could also be or have a unitary occasion. But it is more likely that Whitehead uses “enduring object” more loosely than his definition suggests.

Many of the physical objects with which we deal can be broken down into molecules. If we consider molecules to be enduring objects, then we can say that these ordinary physical objects can be analyzed into enduring objects. Whitehead calls these larger objects “corpuscular societies.” Many of the objects that are, in other philosophies, taken as examples of 30 Whitehead Word Book what is, are, for Whitehead, “corpuscular societies.” Rocks and gases and liquids are all corpuscular societies.

Structured Societies

Unfortunately for conceptual simplicity, neither living systems nor most of the smaller objects of scientific interest are as simple in their composition as enduring objects and corpuscular societies. A stone can be considered a corpuscular society of molecules, since these have much the same physical character even when separated from one another by the crushing of the stone. But the molecule cannot be similarly broken up into atoms. The structuring of the molecule goes beyond the co-existence of the atoms in it. The whole is quite different from the sum of its parts when the parts are considered in their separation from the whole. The molecule is thus a structured society rather than a corpuscular society. Presumably this is true of atoms as well, and probably of electrons and protons.

Whitehead defines a structured society as one that includes “subordinate nexūs” some of which are “socially ordered,” and some are not. These latter are the nonsocial nexūs that we think of as empty space. The cell, as the unit of living things, is an especially interesting example of a structured society. Whitehead proposes a complex analysis here. The cell includes molecules which are themselves structured societies. In relation to the cell they are “subordinate societies.” Like the molecules in a stone, they could exist independently of the cell. Whitehead focuses attention also on the empty space in the cell, the space that lacks any social order, considering this important for the behavior of the cell as a whole. This lack of social order makes novelty possible. It is here that Whitehead locates the life of the cell. This empty space constitutes a “regnant nexus.”

Presumably it is “regnant” in the sense that the cell as a whole responds to stimuli in novel ways that these nexūs make possible. The sharp distinction between the societies and the nonsocial nexūs is based on the teaching that social relations are constituted by repetition of forms. On this understanding, any novel element that may enter into a member of a society does not affect the society as a whole, that is, it is not repeated by successors. Since life is distinguished by novelty, it cannot be the property of a society. Hence it belongs to a nonsocial nexus and that means to the occasions in empty space. However, this analysis was not Whitehead’s last word. Apparently while he was working on the book, a new idea occurred to him. He did not go back and change what he had written, but this idea has proved particularly fruitful. However, for his fully developed understanding of living things, see below the discussion of “living persons.”

Living Person

Humanistic and religious readers of Whitehead often complain that the human being disappears into the matrix of minuscule actual entities. This is a misreading. Whitehead does believe that minuscule actual entities, occasions of quantum action, are very important for cosmology. But he is equally clear that moments of human experience are not analyzable into these events. Indeed they are not divisible into smaller actual entities at all. Human experience is taken as it is, nonreductively. Because a moment of human experience has the status of being an actual occasion, its causal efficacy cannot be ignored, as is typically done in the sciences. Far from losing the human in the matrix of quantum events, he takes its full actuality as the starting point of much of his philosophical analysis.

Nevertheless, prior to his development of the idea of hybrid feelings, his concept of the person was impoverished. A person was a personally ordered society of actual occasions. But personal order simply implied that there was a serial sequence of occasions each of which inherited from its predecessor a common character. Electrons and molecules qualified equally with human beings as personally ordered societies. All could be equally well named “enduring objects.” In other words, Whitehead up to that point understood personal order as a form of social order, and he defined the latter in terms of derivation of a common form from antecedent members of the group.

Hybrid prehensions introduced the possibility of a new kind of society. Since he did not redefine “society” to take account of this, we might have to say that a living person is not a society. I prefer to say that it is a different kind of society, but that would require providing a broader definition. While there certainly are societies with personal order that transmit the same form from occasion to occasion, there are other societies with personal order that are alive. The transmissions from occasion to occasion in these societies introduce novelty. These societies are unquestionably found in animals with central nervous systems. The brains of these animals give rise to a unified experience that is quite different from the addition of all the neuronal experiences that contribute to it. As humans, we know this experience as most intimately who we are.

Whitehead called these momentary experiences “final percipient occasions” or “dominant occasions.” The sequence of these occasions he called a “living person.” Living persons like other personally ordered societies do inherit elements of common form from their predecessors through their pure physical feelings. But they also inherit from their predecessors’ conceptual prehensions. Among the conceptual feelings there are some that simply repeat elements of the past, but there are others that have introduced novelty. The antecedent occasion may have gained information not present in its predecessors. The new occasion, through its hybrid prehensions may appropriate this new information. It may add further to it. In other words, in living persons there is learning. The emergence of novelty of this kind does not leave what has been repeated from the past alone. The integration of the two changes both. Over time there may be little common element of form. There may be little common element of form between a girl of three and the woman she has become at sixty. But this does not mean that she is not the same living person. The occasions that make up the living person sum up the ever growing past rather than simply repeat it.

In Adventures of Ideas Whitehead shifts from “living person” to the more traditional language of “soul.” A question that is raised in many contexts about human persons is their embodiment. Some argue that a person is his or her body. Platonic and Cartesian philosophy separates the person as soul sharply from the body. Whitehead’s view lies between these poles.

Strictly speaking, the person is distinct from the body. As the soul or psyche, it is not as such the bodily organism. We can speak both the “person” and of the “psycho-physical organism,” which includes the person and the body. But Whitehead throughout his philosophy emphasizes that each actual entity, or each event, is largely constituted by its relations to, or prehensions of, antecedent events. The final percipient occasion is largely constituted by what it perceives, although it integrates these perceptions into a single pattern. To a large extent, the living person sums up what is taking place in the body and functions for the sake of the well being of the body.

​Further, it is important to remember that whereas in Plato and Descartes the soul is metaphysically different from the body, for Whitehead it is not. The body is composed of occasions of experience, the soul or living person is also composed of occasions of experience. There are distinctions, but there is certainly no dualism. Followers of Whitehead discuss where else living persons are to be found other than somewhere in the brains of animals with central nervous systems. Probably the chief candidate is the unicellular organism. Whitehead himself cracks the door to this hypothesis without clearly walking through it. For Whiteheadians, such questions are to be decided by evidence. Most Whiteheadians now think the evidence that unicellular organisms learn suffices for us to affirm that they are living persons. Whitehead depicts the occasions that make up the living person as flitting around in the interstices of the brain surrounded by a nonsocial nexus. His language here seems connected with the way he thought of living persons before the introduction of hybrid feelings. However, it is the only speculation he offers."

​- John Cobb