That Rome, That Europe
Whitehead on how History transcends Ideas
"One actual entity has a status among other actual entities, not expressible wholly in terms of contrasts between eternal objects. For example, the complex nexus of ancient imperial Rome to European history is not wholly expressible in universals. It is not merely the contrast of a sort of city, imperial, Roman, ancient, with a sort of history of a sort of continent, sea-indented, river-diversified, with alpine divisions, begirt by larger continental masses and oceanic wastes, civilized, barbarized, christianized, commercialized, industrialized. The nexus in question does involve such a complex contrast of universals. But it involves more. For it is the nexus of that Rome with that Europe. We cannot be conscious of this nexus purely by the aid of conceptual feelings."
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality
Actual Entities vs. Eternal Objects
Whitehead is drawing a sharp distinction between actual entities (concrete, individual events of becoming) and eternal objects (pure potentials, like Platonic forms or concepts). While eternal objects can be used to describe general features—such as “Roman,” “imperial,” or “ancient”—they cannot capture the full, lived, historical nexus (i.e., the actual relationships and inheritances) between particular events or societies.
That Rome and That Europe
The emphasis on that Rome and that Europe signals Whitehead’s insistence on particularity. Rome is not merely an instantiation of the eternal object “city” or “empire.” Europe is not just a continent with rivers and mountains. Rather, their historic interrelation—the way ancient Rome shaped the specific becoming of Europe—is a concrete reality, not fully expressible by abstractions.
Beyond Conceptual Feelings
He writes: “We cannot be conscious of this nexus purely by the aid of conceptual feelings.” Conceptual feelings are feelings of eternal objects. But what’s needed to grasp this historical nexus is what Whitehead calls “physical” feelings—the felt relevance of past actual entities in the becoming of a new occasion. In other words, history lives through concrete inheritance, not merely conceptual recognition.
Implication for Historical and Cultural Understanding
Whitehead’s point challenges any reduction of history to general categories. To truly understand a historical phenomenon, we must recognize the unique relational presence of particular events—how they reverberate through time as more than just examples of types.
Whitehead is reminding us that the becoming of Europe is not just a sequence of abstract historical categories. It is a living memory of Rome as a particular reality—Rome not as idea, but as fact, with all its concrete influence. This passage is a metaphysical affirmation of the irreducibility of the particular—a central theme of Process and Reality.
Actual Entities vs. Eternal Objects
Whitehead is drawing a sharp distinction between actual entities (concrete, individual events of becoming) and eternal objects (pure potentials, like Platonic forms or concepts). While eternal objects can be used to describe general features—such as “Roman,” “imperial,” or “ancient”—they cannot capture the full, lived, historical nexus (i.e., the actual relationships and inheritances) between particular events or societies.
That Rome and That Europe
The emphasis on that Rome and that Europe signals Whitehead’s insistence on particularity. Rome is not merely an instantiation of the eternal object “city” or “empire.” Europe is not just a continent with rivers and mountains. Rather, their historic interrelation—the way ancient Rome shaped the specific becoming of Europe—is a concrete reality, not fully expressible by abstractions.
Beyond Conceptual Feelings
He writes: “We cannot be conscious of this nexus purely by the aid of conceptual feelings.” Conceptual feelings are feelings of eternal objects. But what’s needed to grasp this historical nexus is what Whitehead calls “physical” feelings—the felt relevance of past actual entities in the becoming of a new occasion. In other words, history lives through concrete inheritance, not merely conceptual recognition.
Implication for Historical and Cultural Understanding
Whitehead’s point challenges any reduction of history to general categories. To truly understand a historical phenomenon, we must recognize the unique relational presence of particular events—how they reverberate through time as more than just examples of types.
Whitehead is reminding us that the becoming of Europe is not just a sequence of abstract historical categories. It is a living memory of Rome as a particular reality—Rome not as idea, but as fact, with all its concrete influence. This passage is a metaphysical affirmation of the irreducibility of the particular—a central theme of Process and Reality.
Reflections
Someday, after the wars of our time have passed, we will reflect on them historically, trying to understand why they occurred, how they unfolded, and what happened in their aftermath. We will want to be honest to the events and create a narrative of sorts. Whitehead warns us, however, to keep in mind that the events themselves are always more than our ideas about them, no matter how honest. The “events” are the actual occasions of experience undergone by those involved: the fear in a soldier’s gut, the grief of a mother, the sudden surge of courage, the moment of betrayal, the wordless trauma etched into memory.
Each of these is a nexus—or rather, a nexūs—of lived experience, feelings, and relational impacts. They are not abstractions but concrete actualities, rich with emotional intensity and irreducible specificity. The nations and peoples involved in the wars, too, are nexūs. Our narratives, however carefully constructed, are abstractions from these realities. They help us make sense of the past, but they can never fully encompass it. Whitehead reminds us that history is not merely a chronicle of facts but a distillation of feeling—and that true understanding must be rooted in an awareness of this difference.
To honor the past, then, is not only to recount what happened but to remain humble before its complexity, aware that what really happened was felt, suffered, and endured by living beings whose experiences can only be partially grasped by our reconstructions.
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Our lives are historical. We inherit from past events—some intimate, others distant—and they shape who we are, whether we recognize it or not. We may seek to understand the past through abstractions: names, dates, categories, and concepts. These help us organize what has been. But history is always more than its abstractions. It lives in particularities—in the weight of specific moments, the tone of remembered voices, the texture of losses and hopes handed down. What shapes us is not merely a kind of past, but that past, with all its tangled complexity.
As Whitehead reminds us, we are not formed by universals alone but by concrete nexūs of inherited actualities—felt, carried, and reimagined anew in each moment of becoming. The concreteness and particularity of the past are not necessary or predetermined; they are contingent. They arise out of countless decisions—human and non-human alike—which could have been otherwise.
There is something true but frustrating about this. Would that we could reduce history to stable laws and governing principles—clear forces that shape us and make the past understandable. But we can’t. History resists simplification. It is not a system of necessities but an entangled mess of contingencies: choices made, paths not taken, accidents, resistances, longings, and betrayals.
If we live in Europe, for example, we are affected by our Roman past—not just by any Rome or any Europe, but by that Rome and that Europe. Their historical nexus is not a mere abstraction; it is a living inheritance. Rome is not simply a symbol of empire; it is a concrete actuality whose influence still courses through European law, architecture, language, and imagination. Europe is not merely a continent; it is a becoming shaped by that particular past.
That Rome and that Europe could have been otherwise—and yet they were not. They became what they became through a thousand interwoven threads, many of which were frayed or broken. We long for coherence, but what we inherit is complexity—unfinished, unresolved, and still unfolding. In this sense, the past is not fixed behind us. It is with us, layered into our present, still capable of revealing new meanings and demanding new responses.
Hegelians and Marxists often speak of the laws of history—dialectical movements or material conditions—by which history supposedly unfolds with a kind of inner necessity. On this view, contingency is illusion; history has direction, structure, even inevitability. But Whitehead disagrees. For him, there are no strict laws of historical becoming—only patterns that emerge, dissolve, and reconfigure through actual occasions of experience. The unfolding of history is not the realization of an abstract telos but a creative advance into novelty, moment by moment.
In Whitehead’s philosophy, the past shapes the present, yes—but not as a script. It is inherited as a felt presence, a reservoir of actualities that offer both constraint and possibility. Each moment must decide anew how to receive that inheritance and what to make of it. There is no iron logic to history, no final synthesis, only the messy improvisation of a world in process. History is not the product of an idea working itself out, but of countless subjects responding—sometimes wisely, sometimes disastrously—to the lure of what might yet be.