Hybrid Physical Feelings
Whitehead's Groundbreaking Idea
and Ten Implications
One of Whitehead’s most groundbreaking ideas is that of hybrid physical prehensions—prehensions in which we humans may feel the mental poles of other actualities (their conceptual feelings, aims, or aspirations) immediately, without the mediation of contiguous chains of physical causation. Whitehead proposes that we experience God directly through such prehensions, receiving in the depths of our own subjectivity God’s conceptual feelings—God’s hopes and lures for what might be. His philosophy of organism leaves room for such prehensions to reach across time, space, and dimensions, extending not only into the mental pole of God but also into those of other creatures, ancestors, collectives, and the more-than-human world. Nothing in the metaphysical scheme rules them out. Indeed, it is possible that animals, plants, and even spirits (if they exist) also participate in such prehensions, sensing the conceptual poles of others in ways we can only guess at.
The crucial question, then, is not metaphysical but empirical: do such prehensions in fact occur? To approach this, one must turn to the evidence of lived experience—personal testimony, cross-cultural accounts, artistic reports, mystical encounters, and even parapsychological research. The question before us is not “Could it be so?” but “What does the evidence suggest?”
Quotes from Whitehead
A pure physical prehension is a prehension whose datum is an antecedent occasion objectified in respect to one of its own physical prehensions. A hybrid prehension has as its datum an antecedent occasion objectified in respect to a conceptual prehension. Thus a pure physical prehension is the transmission of physical feeling, while hybrid prehension is the transmission of mental feeling.
- AN Whitehead. Process and Reality
There are evidently two subspecies of hybrid feelings: (i) those which feel the conceptual feelings of temporal actual entities, and (ii) those which feel the conceptual feelings of God. The objectification of God in a temporal subject is effected by the hybrid feelings with God’s conceptual feelings as data.
- AN Whitehead. Process and Reality
- AN Whitehead. Process and Reality
There are evidently two subspecies of hybrid feelings: (i) those which feel the conceptual feelings of temporal actual entities, and (ii) those which feel the conceptual feelings of God. The objectification of God in a temporal subject is effected by the hybrid feelings with God’s conceptual feelings as data.
- AN Whitehead. Process and Reality
Thus the primary phase [of concrescence] is a hybrid physical feeling of God, in respect to God’s conceptual feeling which is immediately relevant to the universe ‘given’ for that concrescence. There is then..a derived conceptual feeling which reproduces for the subject the data and valuation of God’s conceptual feeling. This conceptual feeling is the initial conceptual aim referred to in the preceding statement."
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
There is no reason to assimilate the conditions for hybrid prehensions to those for pure physical prehensions. Indeed the contrary hypothesis is the more natural. For the conceptual pole does not share in the coordinate divisibility of the physical pole, and the extensive continuum is derived from this coordinate divisibility. Thus the doctrine of immediate objectification for the mental poles and of mediate objectification for the physical poles seems most consonant to the philosophy of organism in its application to the present cosmic epoch. This conclusion has some empirical support, both from the evidence for peculiar instances of telepathy, and from the instinctive apprehension of a tone of feeling in ordinary social intercourse. This conclusion has some empirical support, both from the evidence for peculiar instances of telepathy, and from the instinctive apprehension of a tone of feeling in ordinary social intercourse.
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
- AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
Ten Implications
In Process and Reality, Whitehead identifies two kinds of hybrid physical prehensions: those that feel the conceptual feelings of temporal actual entities and those that feel the conceptual feelings of God. These prehensions are “hybrid” because they are physical feelings whose data are another actuality’s conceptual feelings—its aims, valuations, and imagined possibilities—rather than its purely physical feelings. Here are some implications
1. Prehending our own past experiences in immediate ways unmediated by intervening experiences
An actual occasion not only inherits the physical tone of its own past occasions, but can also prehend the conceptual feelings from its own earlier mental poles. In doing so, it is in fact prehending other temporal actualities—namely, its own past selves as concrescing subjects in the past. These past selves are complete occasions of experience, each with its own subjective aim, emotional tone, and conceptual grasp of possibilities. This makes it possible to carry forward, re-feel, and even re-interpret those earlier valuations and insights in vivid ways. Significantly, such prehension is not limited to the contiguous past—those moments directly adjacent in the stream of experience—but can reach across time to non-contiguous past selves, bypassing intermediate occasions. This explains why long-forgotten experiences, even from childhood, can sometimes arise with unexpected vividness, bringing with them the conceptual orientation we had at that time.
2. Prehending the minds of others (ordinary conversation and telepathy)
Hybrid physical prehensions also allow us to feel the conceptual poles of other temporal beings—other people, perhaps other animals, and any other kinds of temporal actualities that may exist. In everyday life, this shows up as empathy: directly sensing another’s mood, orientation, or intention without conscious inference. This can be subtle, as in the way another person’s calm presence soothes us, or intense, as in moments of emotional contagion. In exceptional circumstances, such hybrid prehensions might be unusually vivid, producing what could be described as telepathic experiences—where one person seems to “receive” ideas, images, or feelings from another without ordinary sensory communication. Importantly, this prehending of others is not restricted to contiguous cases—those directly connected by a chain of immediate inheritances—but can, in principle, leap across space and time. This can include vividly experiencing what was happening in the distant past, whether with human or non-human beings, and even experiencing forms of actuality not bound by three-dimensional space. Such experiences may feel visionary or mystical, yet in Whitehead’s scheme they are extreme cases of the same metaphysical process that underlies all relational feeling.
3. Prehending God’s conceptual feelings and aspirations for us (initial aims)
The second subspecies of hybrid feeling—prehending God’s conceptual feelings—grounds Whitehead’s understanding of divine presence. The “objectification of God” in a temporal subject occurs when the subject feels God’s primordial ordering of possibilities relevant to its concrete situation. In process theology, this is the initial aim: God’s valuation of the best possibilities for that moment. What is felt, however, is not only the combinedly desired possibilities that God hopes will actualize, but also the subjective form of God’s feeling of those possibilities—that is, God’s hope itself that they will be realized. In this sense, hybrid prehensions allow us to experience God’s own desires within us. These desires are never coercive; they are invitations to become, co-creatively, in ways that enrich the world and the divine life itself.
Taken together, these three implications show that hybrid physical prehensions form a continuous thread linking self-reflection, empathy with others, and communion with God. They make possible the vivid integration of our own past (by prehending our earlier selves as past actualities, sometimes across great stretches of time), the direct feeling of other beings’ aims and moods (sometimes in exceptional, telepathic-like ways that transcend space, time, and even three-dimensional constraints), and the reception of divine hope and desire for the world’s becoming. These are implications to which Whitehead pointed directly. What follows are some implications he did not explore but that follow from what he said: namely that we may be able to "prehend" or feel, in an immediate way, the minds of others.
What follows are more speculative possibilities that are amplifications of the previous three.
4. Prehending the dead (ancestors, saints, spirits)
In Whitehead’s philosophy, no actuality ever simply vanishes into nothingness. Each moment of experience, once it perishes as a subject, lives on as an object for others — and ultimately is gathered into God’s consequent nature. Hybrid physical prehensions provide a way of understanding how the living may still feel the presence of those who have died.
This prehension is not necessarily a sensory apparition or a recollection mediated by memory. Rather, it may involve the immediate grasp of the mental poles of the departed: their conceptual feelings, aspirations, or subjective forms of existence. These feelings are preserved both in God and in the wider web of relationality, available for sympathetic prehension by those still alive.
Experientially, this might manifest as a profound sense of being accompanied by ancestors, a perception of guidance from saints, or the quiet conviction that one’s loved ones are still “with” them. Across cultures, such experiences are reported as ancestral veneration, communion with saints, or encounters with spirits. From a process perspective, these need not be dismissed as mere imagination or illusion. Instead, they may be understood as instances of hybrid prehension across boundaries — the living directly prehending the preserved subjective forms of the dead.
This implication stretches process thought into the domain of ancestral memory and spiritual presence, suggesting that communion between the living and the dead is metaphysically possible. It acknowledges why practices such as ancestral rites, prayers for the dead, or the Christian idea of the “communion of saints”
5. Prehending actualities beyond three-dimensional space
If actualities exist in other dimensions of existence, their mental poles—conceptual feelings, aspirations, aims, even imaginative longings—may be immediately prehended by us. Hybrid physical prehensions, in this case, are not limited to the physical world as we ordinarily experience it in three-dimensional space. They can extend into realms of existence whose coordinates differ from our own. The implication is that what we take to be "inspiration," "visions," or "messages" may in fact be instances of prehending the mental poles of other actualities whose dimensionality exceeds or diverges from our ordinary world.
This widens the scope of telepathic or trans-temporal connection, not only across space and time but across dimensions of being. The prehensions are still “physical” in Whitehead’s sense, because they are immediate objectifications of other actualities—but their source may be extra-dimensional. In this way, hybrid prehensions could offer us a window into alternative forms of reality, disclosing conceptual appetitions that guide us toward new possibilities of becoming.
6. Prehending actualities in distant dimensions of the physical universe
Hybrid physical prehensions may also include the direct objectification of actualities in remote regions of the cosmos, far beyond the reach of our usual sensory apparatus or the mediation of successive contiguous occasions. Just as we may prehend our own past selves or the conceptual feelings of God, it is possible that we can prehend what is occurring in other parts of the universe—galaxies, stars, or planetary systems light-years away—without waiting for causal transmission through the intervening chain of occasions.
Such prehensions would not give us a photographic picture of those distant worlds but rather an immediate felt sense of their conceptual poles—their tendencies, aspirations, or moods. In exceptional cases, this may manifest as vivid awareness of distant cosmic events or entities, experienced as if they were “here.” In this way, hybrid physical prehensions suggest the possibility of a participatory connectedness with the far reaches of space, linking our local becoming with the wider becoming of the universe.
7. Prehending negative and harmful minds
Hybrid prehensions need not always be uplifting. Just as we may sympathetically prehend the creative aims of God, ancestors, or natural beings, so too we may prehend the destructive conceptual poles of actualities—those rooted in fear, anger, resentment, or cruelty. These aims, once actualized, also live on in the universe and may exert influence through hybrid prehension.
This could explain experiences of being weighed down by “dark moods,” overcome by violent impulses, or feeling as if one were caught in a wave of destructive energy not entirely one’s own. Cultures sometimes describe such prehensions as encounters with “evil spirits” or “malevolent forces.” From a process perspective, these experiences may indeed involve direct contact with the preserved subjective forms of harmful actualities—whether individual or collective.
Acknowledging this possibility deepens the realism of process thought: hybrid prehensions are not guaranteed to connect us only with the good, the beautiful, or the divine. They can also connect us with negative inheritances and destructive possibilities that must be resisted, transformed, or healed. Just as art and ethics draw inspiration from the lures of beauty and love, violence and hatred may be fueled by prehending the twisted aims of past or present actualities.
In this sense, hybrid prehensions are morally ambivalent—they can transmit both divine lures and toxic residues. What matters is how we integrate what is felt, how we discern which aims to amplify, and which to set aside in the ongoing work of becoming.
8. Prehending artistic possibilities (artistic inspiration)
Artistic inspiration can be understood as a special case of hybrid physical prehension. In Whitehead’s philosophy, every moment of creativity is partly the result of prehending the conceptual poles of other actualities—their feelings of possibility, their appetitions for what might be. When artists describe themselves as “receiving” inspiration, as if something comes to them from beyond themselves, this can be interpreted literally: they are prehending conceptual feelings that belong to other actualities.
Sometimes these inspirations arise from the conceptual pole of God—the primordial nature, where all eternal objects and their possible harmonies are envisaged. Here, the artist feels the divine lure toward beauty or novelty, a pressure of possibility that exceeds what can yet be imagined or expressed.
At other times, inspiration may come from the preserved conceptual poles of past human actualities—ancestors, poets, painters, musicians—whose unfinished aims still live on and are available for sympathetic prehension. An artist may feel themselves “in dialogue” with earlier voices, carrying their aspirations forward in a new key.
Inspiration may also come from the conceptual poles of non-human actualities: the song of birds, the rhythm of rivers, the silent grandeur of stars. These are not merely sensory impressions but invitations that arise from the aims of living and cosmic beings, whose appetitions can be felt directly.
Finally, artists sometimes draw from the conceptual poles of collective actualities—societies, cultures, historical epochs—that carry their own moods and aims. This may be why certain artistic styles or movements emerge across the world at the same time: artists are prehending the shared appetitions of their age.
Thus, artistic inspiration is not a private fantasy but a relational event. It is the living prehension of conceptual poles that belong to God, to the dead, to non-human others, or to collective wholes. What is born in the artist’s imagination is the translation of these conceptual appetitions into form, sound, color, or word—a local act of creation that participates in a larger network of becoming.
9. Prehending the minds of other animals, plants, and the living Earth
Hybrid prehensions expand our sense of connection with the living Earth. If we can directly prehend the conceptual poles of other actualities, then our relationships with animals, plants, ecosystems, and even geological or cosmic processes are not limited to sensory perception or rational inference. We can, at times, feel their aims and aspirations from within.
This helps explain the widespread sense of kinship with non-human beings found in Indigenous traditions, ecological spirituality, and certain forms of art. The song of a bird, the stillness of a mountain, or the rhythm of an ocean tide may be felt not merely as external data but as voices of other beings calling us into relation. These experiences are instances of hybrid prehensions of the more-than-human world.
The implications are profound: our ethical and spiritual responsibilities extend beyond humanity because we are already woven into the subjective aims of other creatures. The destruction of ecosystems is not only a material loss but also a diminishment of the chorus of aims that inform our own becoming. Conversely, acts of ecological care allow us to enter more deeply into a symphony of interspecies creativity.
In this light, the more-than-human world is not simply background or resource. It is a community of subjects, each with its own conceptual pole, with whom we are in continuous exchange. Hybrid prehensions make explicit what many traditions intuit: that our creativity and flourishing depend upon listening to and honoring the voices of other beings.
10. Prehending as Channeling the Voices of others
Hybrid prehensions call into question the romantic ideal of the “solitary genius” who creates in isolation. If, as process thought suggests, every actual occasion inherits from others and every act of creativity arises from hybrid prehensions of conceptual poles beyond the self, then no author is ever truly alone.
The writer, composer, or painter is always informed by the voices of others: the unfinished aims of past creators, the moods of a culture, the conceptual appetitions of non-human life, and the lure of God’s imagination. Even when an artist feels most original, their originality is in part a synthesis of inherited lures prehended in novel ways.
This does not diminish the importance of the artist’s own decisions—the concrescence of their occasion of experience. It does, however, qualify the myth of authorship as purely individual. What we call an “author” is more like a nodal point in a vast chorus of voices—a site where many conceptual poles converge, and from which something new emerges.
The implications are both humbling and liberating. Humbling, because the self cannot claim absolute ownership of its creations. Liberating, because creativity is revealed as a participatory process, a collaborative weaving of many lures into a new expression of beauty. In this sense, all artistry is a collective act, even when signed with a single name.
Still, the presence of hybrid prehensions does not erase the element of freedom that belongs to each moment of experience. What is prehended—whether divine lure, ancestral aspiration, or destructive aim—enters into the becoming of the present, but it does not determine it. Each actual occasion must decide how to integrate what is felt, which voices to amplify, and which to diminish or reject. Hybrid prehensions widen the field of influences that stream into the present, but the act of concrescence retains its irreducible freedom: the capacity to weave those influences into a unique synthesis
1. Prehending our own past experiences in immediate ways unmediated by intervening experiences
An actual occasion not only inherits the physical tone of its own past occasions, but can also prehend the conceptual feelings from its own earlier mental poles. In doing so, it is in fact prehending other temporal actualities—namely, its own past selves as concrescing subjects in the past. These past selves are complete occasions of experience, each with its own subjective aim, emotional tone, and conceptual grasp of possibilities. This makes it possible to carry forward, re-feel, and even re-interpret those earlier valuations and insights in vivid ways. Significantly, such prehension is not limited to the contiguous past—those moments directly adjacent in the stream of experience—but can reach across time to non-contiguous past selves, bypassing intermediate occasions. This explains why long-forgotten experiences, even from childhood, can sometimes arise with unexpected vividness, bringing with them the conceptual orientation we had at that time.
2. Prehending the minds of others (ordinary conversation and telepathy)
Hybrid physical prehensions also allow us to feel the conceptual poles of other temporal beings—other people, perhaps other animals, and any other kinds of temporal actualities that may exist. In everyday life, this shows up as empathy: directly sensing another’s mood, orientation, or intention without conscious inference. This can be subtle, as in the way another person’s calm presence soothes us, or intense, as in moments of emotional contagion. In exceptional circumstances, such hybrid prehensions might be unusually vivid, producing what could be described as telepathic experiences—where one person seems to “receive” ideas, images, or feelings from another without ordinary sensory communication. Importantly, this prehending of others is not restricted to contiguous cases—those directly connected by a chain of immediate inheritances—but can, in principle, leap across space and time. This can include vividly experiencing what was happening in the distant past, whether with human or non-human beings, and even experiencing forms of actuality not bound by three-dimensional space. Such experiences may feel visionary or mystical, yet in Whitehead’s scheme they are extreme cases of the same metaphysical process that underlies all relational feeling.
3. Prehending God’s conceptual feelings and aspirations for us (initial aims)
The second subspecies of hybrid feeling—prehending God’s conceptual feelings—grounds Whitehead’s understanding of divine presence. The “objectification of God” in a temporal subject occurs when the subject feels God’s primordial ordering of possibilities relevant to its concrete situation. In process theology, this is the initial aim: God’s valuation of the best possibilities for that moment. What is felt, however, is not only the combinedly desired possibilities that God hopes will actualize, but also the subjective form of God’s feeling of those possibilities—that is, God’s hope itself that they will be realized. In this sense, hybrid prehensions allow us to experience God’s own desires within us. These desires are never coercive; they are invitations to become, co-creatively, in ways that enrich the world and the divine life itself.
Taken together, these three implications show that hybrid physical prehensions form a continuous thread linking self-reflection, empathy with others, and communion with God. They make possible the vivid integration of our own past (by prehending our earlier selves as past actualities, sometimes across great stretches of time), the direct feeling of other beings’ aims and moods (sometimes in exceptional, telepathic-like ways that transcend space, time, and even three-dimensional constraints), and the reception of divine hope and desire for the world’s becoming. These are implications to which Whitehead pointed directly. What follows are some implications he did not explore but that follow from what he said: namely that we may be able to "prehend" or feel, in an immediate way, the minds of others.
What follows are more speculative possibilities that are amplifications of the previous three.
4. Prehending the dead (ancestors, saints, spirits)
In Whitehead’s philosophy, no actuality ever simply vanishes into nothingness. Each moment of experience, once it perishes as a subject, lives on as an object for others — and ultimately is gathered into God’s consequent nature. Hybrid physical prehensions provide a way of understanding how the living may still feel the presence of those who have died.
This prehension is not necessarily a sensory apparition or a recollection mediated by memory. Rather, it may involve the immediate grasp of the mental poles of the departed: their conceptual feelings, aspirations, or subjective forms of existence. These feelings are preserved both in God and in the wider web of relationality, available for sympathetic prehension by those still alive.
Experientially, this might manifest as a profound sense of being accompanied by ancestors, a perception of guidance from saints, or the quiet conviction that one’s loved ones are still “with” them. Across cultures, such experiences are reported as ancestral veneration, communion with saints, or encounters with spirits. From a process perspective, these need not be dismissed as mere imagination or illusion. Instead, they may be understood as instances of hybrid prehension across boundaries — the living directly prehending the preserved subjective forms of the dead.
This implication stretches process thought into the domain of ancestral memory and spiritual presence, suggesting that communion between the living and the dead is metaphysically possible. It acknowledges why practices such as ancestral rites, prayers for the dead, or the Christian idea of the “communion of saints”
5. Prehending actualities beyond three-dimensional space
If actualities exist in other dimensions of existence, their mental poles—conceptual feelings, aspirations, aims, even imaginative longings—may be immediately prehended by us. Hybrid physical prehensions, in this case, are not limited to the physical world as we ordinarily experience it in three-dimensional space. They can extend into realms of existence whose coordinates differ from our own. The implication is that what we take to be "inspiration," "visions," or "messages" may in fact be instances of prehending the mental poles of other actualities whose dimensionality exceeds or diverges from our ordinary world.
This widens the scope of telepathic or trans-temporal connection, not only across space and time but across dimensions of being. The prehensions are still “physical” in Whitehead’s sense, because they are immediate objectifications of other actualities—but their source may be extra-dimensional. In this way, hybrid prehensions could offer us a window into alternative forms of reality, disclosing conceptual appetitions that guide us toward new possibilities of becoming.
6. Prehending actualities in distant dimensions of the physical universe
Hybrid physical prehensions may also include the direct objectification of actualities in remote regions of the cosmos, far beyond the reach of our usual sensory apparatus or the mediation of successive contiguous occasions. Just as we may prehend our own past selves or the conceptual feelings of God, it is possible that we can prehend what is occurring in other parts of the universe—galaxies, stars, or planetary systems light-years away—without waiting for causal transmission through the intervening chain of occasions.
Such prehensions would not give us a photographic picture of those distant worlds but rather an immediate felt sense of their conceptual poles—their tendencies, aspirations, or moods. In exceptional cases, this may manifest as vivid awareness of distant cosmic events or entities, experienced as if they were “here.” In this way, hybrid physical prehensions suggest the possibility of a participatory connectedness with the far reaches of space, linking our local becoming with the wider becoming of the universe.
7. Prehending negative and harmful minds
Hybrid prehensions need not always be uplifting. Just as we may sympathetically prehend the creative aims of God, ancestors, or natural beings, so too we may prehend the destructive conceptual poles of actualities—those rooted in fear, anger, resentment, or cruelty. These aims, once actualized, also live on in the universe and may exert influence through hybrid prehension.
This could explain experiences of being weighed down by “dark moods,” overcome by violent impulses, or feeling as if one were caught in a wave of destructive energy not entirely one’s own. Cultures sometimes describe such prehensions as encounters with “evil spirits” or “malevolent forces.” From a process perspective, these experiences may indeed involve direct contact with the preserved subjective forms of harmful actualities—whether individual or collective.
Acknowledging this possibility deepens the realism of process thought: hybrid prehensions are not guaranteed to connect us only with the good, the beautiful, or the divine. They can also connect us with negative inheritances and destructive possibilities that must be resisted, transformed, or healed. Just as art and ethics draw inspiration from the lures of beauty and love, violence and hatred may be fueled by prehending the twisted aims of past or present actualities.
In this sense, hybrid prehensions are morally ambivalent—they can transmit both divine lures and toxic residues. What matters is how we integrate what is felt, how we discern which aims to amplify, and which to set aside in the ongoing work of becoming.
8. Prehending artistic possibilities (artistic inspiration)
Artistic inspiration can be understood as a special case of hybrid physical prehension. In Whitehead’s philosophy, every moment of creativity is partly the result of prehending the conceptual poles of other actualities—their feelings of possibility, their appetitions for what might be. When artists describe themselves as “receiving” inspiration, as if something comes to them from beyond themselves, this can be interpreted literally: they are prehending conceptual feelings that belong to other actualities.
Sometimes these inspirations arise from the conceptual pole of God—the primordial nature, where all eternal objects and their possible harmonies are envisaged. Here, the artist feels the divine lure toward beauty or novelty, a pressure of possibility that exceeds what can yet be imagined or expressed.
At other times, inspiration may come from the preserved conceptual poles of past human actualities—ancestors, poets, painters, musicians—whose unfinished aims still live on and are available for sympathetic prehension. An artist may feel themselves “in dialogue” with earlier voices, carrying their aspirations forward in a new key.
Inspiration may also come from the conceptual poles of non-human actualities: the song of birds, the rhythm of rivers, the silent grandeur of stars. These are not merely sensory impressions but invitations that arise from the aims of living and cosmic beings, whose appetitions can be felt directly.
Finally, artists sometimes draw from the conceptual poles of collective actualities—societies, cultures, historical epochs—that carry their own moods and aims. This may be why certain artistic styles or movements emerge across the world at the same time: artists are prehending the shared appetitions of their age.
Thus, artistic inspiration is not a private fantasy but a relational event. It is the living prehension of conceptual poles that belong to God, to the dead, to non-human others, or to collective wholes. What is born in the artist’s imagination is the translation of these conceptual appetitions into form, sound, color, or word—a local act of creation that participates in a larger network of becoming.
9. Prehending the minds of other animals, plants, and the living Earth
Hybrid prehensions expand our sense of connection with the living Earth. If we can directly prehend the conceptual poles of other actualities, then our relationships with animals, plants, ecosystems, and even geological or cosmic processes are not limited to sensory perception or rational inference. We can, at times, feel their aims and aspirations from within.
This helps explain the widespread sense of kinship with non-human beings found in Indigenous traditions, ecological spirituality, and certain forms of art. The song of a bird, the stillness of a mountain, or the rhythm of an ocean tide may be felt not merely as external data but as voices of other beings calling us into relation. These experiences are instances of hybrid prehensions of the more-than-human world.
The implications are profound: our ethical and spiritual responsibilities extend beyond humanity because we are already woven into the subjective aims of other creatures. The destruction of ecosystems is not only a material loss but also a diminishment of the chorus of aims that inform our own becoming. Conversely, acts of ecological care allow us to enter more deeply into a symphony of interspecies creativity.
In this light, the more-than-human world is not simply background or resource. It is a community of subjects, each with its own conceptual pole, with whom we are in continuous exchange. Hybrid prehensions make explicit what many traditions intuit: that our creativity and flourishing depend upon listening to and honoring the voices of other beings.
10. Prehending as Channeling the Voices of others
Hybrid prehensions call into question the romantic ideal of the “solitary genius” who creates in isolation. If, as process thought suggests, every actual occasion inherits from others and every act of creativity arises from hybrid prehensions of conceptual poles beyond the self, then no author is ever truly alone.
The writer, composer, or painter is always informed by the voices of others: the unfinished aims of past creators, the moods of a culture, the conceptual appetitions of non-human life, and the lure of God’s imagination. Even when an artist feels most original, their originality is in part a synthesis of inherited lures prehended in novel ways.
This does not diminish the importance of the artist’s own decisions—the concrescence of their occasion of experience. It does, however, qualify the myth of authorship as purely individual. What we call an “author” is more like a nodal point in a vast chorus of voices—a site where many conceptual poles converge, and from which something new emerges.
The implications are both humbling and liberating. Humbling, because the self cannot claim absolute ownership of its creations. Liberating, because creativity is revealed as a participatory process, a collaborative weaving of many lures into a new expression of beauty. In this sense, all artistry is a collective act, even when signed with a single name.
Still, the presence of hybrid prehensions does not erase the element of freedom that belongs to each moment of experience. What is prehended—whether divine lure, ancestral aspiration, or destructive aim—enters into the becoming of the present, but it does not determine it. Each actual occasion must decide how to integrate what is felt, which voices to amplify, and which to diminish or reject. Hybrid prehensions widen the field of influences that stream into the present, but the act of concrescence retains its irreducible freedom: the capacity to weave those influences into a unique synthesis
How We Experience God
Hybrid Physical Feelings of God
"Each temporal entity, in one sense, originates from its mental pole, analogously to God himself. It derives from God its basic conceptual aim, relevant to its actual world, yet with indeterminations awaiting its own decisions. This subjective aim, in its successive modifications, remains the unifying factor governing the successive phases of interplay between physical and conceptual feelings. These decisions are impossible for the nascent creature antecedently to the novelties in the phases of its concrescence. But this statement in its turn requires amplification. With this amplification the doctrine, that the primary phase of a temporal actual entity is physical, is recovered. A ‘physical feeling’ is here defined to be the feeling of another actuality. If the other actuality be objectified by its conceptual feelings, the physical feeling of the subject in question is termed ‘hybrid.’
Thus the primary phase is a hybrid physical feeling of God, in respect to God’s conceptual feeling which is immediately relevant to the universe ‘given’ for that concrescence. There is then, according to the Category of Conceptual Valuation, i.e., Categoreal Obligation IV, a derived conceptual feeling which reproduces for the subject the data and valuation of God’s conceptual feeling. This conceptual feeling is the initial conceptual aim referred to in the preceding statement."
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
Thus the primary phase is a hybrid physical feeling of God, in respect to God’s conceptual feeling which is immediately relevant to the universe ‘given’ for that concrescence. There is then, according to the Category of Conceptual Valuation, i.e., Categoreal Obligation IV, a derived conceptual feeling which reproduces for the subject the data and valuation of God’s conceptual feeling. This conceptual feeling is the initial conceptual aim referred to in the preceding statement."
AN Whitehead, Process and Reality
This passage from Process and Reality is Whitehead’s dense but crucial description of how a temporal actual entity begins and unfolds in relation to God’s conceptual aim. Here’s a breakdown in clearer terms:
1. Origin in the Mental Pole
- Every temporal actual entity (moment of experience) begins, in one sense, from its mental pole—its capacity to entertain possibilities and purposes.
- This is analogous to God’s own nature.
- The entity receives from God an initial conceptual aim—a guiding possibility relevant to its specific situation.
- This aim includes indeterminacies, leaving room for the entity’s own decisions as it develops.
2. Subjective Aim as Unifying Thread
- The subjective aim—this lure toward a certain kind of completion—remains the central unifying factor through all stages of the entity’s becoming.
- It governs how physical feelings (of what is given from the past) and conceptual feelings (of what might be) interact over time.
- This aim is not fixed once and for all but undergoes successive modifications in response to new factors arising during concrescence.
3. Decision and Novelty
- The entity cannot make final decisions before it encounters new elements in its own unfolding.
- Decisions depend on novelties—unexpected data or possibilities—that emerge during the process.
4. Primary Phase is Physical
- Whitehead qualifies the earlier point by noting that, while the entity’s unity comes from its subjective aim, the first phase of its becoming is physical.
- Physical feeling = feeling the actuality of another.
- If the other actuality is felt through its conceptual feelings, it’s called a hybrid physical feeling.
5. Hybrid Physical Feeling of God
- In the primary phase, the new entity has a hybrid physical feeling of God.
- Specifically, it feels God’s conceptual feeling as relevant to its own given universe.
- This is not abstract theology—this is metaphysical mechanics: the entity’s first touch with God is by physically feeling God’s valuation of possibilities.
6. Deriving the Conceptual Aim
- By Categoreal Obligation IV (Category of Conceptual Valuation), this initial physical feeling of God’s valuation generates a derived conceptual feeling in the creature.
- This is the initial conceptual aim that will guide the rest of its becoming.
Summary Flow
- First moment: The new entity physically feels God’s valuation of possibilities.
- Derivation: From this, it receives its initial conceptual aim—its purpose.
- Development: The aim modifies in light of ongoing physical and conceptual feelings.
- Decisions: The entity makes decisions as novelties arise.
- Completion: The unified process (concrescence) ends when the aim is satisfied as much as possible in that situation.