The Extensive Continuum:
Michael Halewood in Munich
13th International Whitehead Conference 2023
Whitehead and the History of Philosophy Munich, Germany 26.-29. July 2023
Alfred North Whitehead developed his process philosophy with an explicit reliance on the value of the history of philosophy. While the trend of recent years has often suggested that different approaches to philosophical problems can be adequately categorized, using the dichotomy of purely systematic or purely historical interests, Whitehead offers an equally historically informed and systematically intended perspective.
For playlist for all the talks at the conference, click here.
Michael Halewood teaches at the University of Essex. His research addresses the relationship of philosophy to social theory, including the work of A. N. Whitehead, Marx, Stengers, Irigaray, Butler, and John Dewey. He is an Associate Editor of the Whitehead Publication Project. He is also an International Academic Advisor for the Whitehead Research Project." He is an Associate Editor of the Whitehead Publication Project. This project has a contract with Edinburgh University Press to produce a new critical edition of the complete works of A. N. Whitehead. He is also an International Academic Advisor for the Whitehead Research Project.
Whitehead on the Extensive Continuum
This extensive continuum expresses the solidarity of all possible standpoints throughout the whole process of the world. It is not a fact prior to the world; it is the first determination of order— that is, of real potentiality— arising out of the general character of the world. In its full generality beyond the present epoch, it does not involve shapes, dimensions, or measurability; these are additional determinations of real potentiality arising from our cosmic epoch...This extensive continuum is ‘real,’ because it expresses a fact derived from the actual world and concerning the contemporary actual world.
"The reality of the future is bound up with the reality of this continuum. It is the reality of what is potential, in its character of a real component of what is actual."
"Thus we can never survey the actual world except from the standpoint of an immediate concrescence which is falsifying the presupposed completion. The creativity in virtue of which any relative complete actual world is, by the nature of things, the datum for a new concrescence is termed ‘transition.’ Thus, by reason of transition, ‘the actual world’ is always a relative term, and refers to that basis of presupposed actual occasions which is a datum for the novel concrescence."
"In the mere extensive continuum there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall be atomized, so as to form the real perspective standpoint for the primary data constituting the basic phase in the concrescence of an actual entity. The factors in the actual world whereby this determination is effected will be discussed at a later stage of this investigation. They constitute the initial phase of the ‘subjective aim.’ This initial phase is a direct derivate from God's primordial nature."
Whitehead, Alfred North. Process and Reality (Gifford Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh During the Session 1927-28)
Notes and Comments
Michael Halewood's Talk at Munich
summary and appreciation
Jay McDaniel
In Whitehead's philosophy the extensive continuum is not just an idea or imaginative construct. It can be experienced; it helps give rise to the solidarity of the world; it includes but is more than four-dimensional space; and it serves as one way that the future, though not yet determined, is nevertheless present in the universe and in human life. In his talk at the International Whitehead Conference in Munich, Michael Halewood of University of Essex brings it to life, suggesting that it is the real potentiality from which every moment of experience emerges.
*
If we think of "reality" in overly physical terms, we will miss the continuum even as it is everywhere present. It is not divided into units, even though what is within it, the things that atomize it, are dividable. In itself, it cannot be defined in terms of shapes, dimensions, or measurability. It is extensiveness as such, understood as a factor in all experience.
Some imagine this continuum as a space-time continuum, albeit potential but not actual. It is populated by regions that are then atomized by actual events: a placeless place that is atomized and occupied by actual entities but nevertheless transcends them. Its regions may include eleven dimensions and much more — all potential forms of extensiveness imaginable by mathematicians, which may or may not be actualized.
Michael Halewood does not use this language, which, for him and perhaps also for Whitehead, would be too Newtonian. Nevertheless, Halewood insists that the continuum—shapeless, dimensionless, and immeasurable—is real in the sense of being really experienced, albeit not as an object among objects in the past actual world. It is the real potentiality of the past actual world becoming unified as it is passing into the present.
If we need to assign it an ontological status, then the phrase "real potentiality" is the closest we come. Not a place but a potentiality, "experienceable" but not "picturable."
Real but not Actual: Unlike actual entities which, according to Whitehead's ontological principle, are the "reasons" why things happen as they do, the extensive continuum does not have feelings of its own and does not make decisions. It does not actualize possibilities, be they those possibilities of eternal objects (pure potentialities) or propositions (lures for feeling). It is not an agent among agents. It does not explain why the world, as it is—happy or sad, just or unjust, tragic or beautiful—is "as it is."
Principle of Relativity: Still, it is a feature of all experience: human experience, atomic experience, cellular experience, stellar experience, ancestral experience, and perhaps also divine experience. In any given part of our universe, and in any given epoch in the history of the universe, the extensive continuum is present and experienced as real potentiality. Halewood links it with Whitehead's principle of relativity: the idea that all entities are "present in" all others. He does not say it, but I will: Even the divine reality, even God, partakes of the real potentiality of the continuum, inasmuch as the past actual world is forever transported into the divine life by means of the solidarity of the universe, which is at the heart of the continuum.
Solidarity: Part of the extensive continuum's reality, and thus its "experienceability," pertains to the fact that, in any given moment of experience, we inherit a past actual world that exhibits solidarity. In Whitehead's philosophy, solidarity is different from community. The "solidarity" of the universe is that of one thing following many others: the passing on of the world into the present, by means of which one thing is "present in" another that succeeds it. Thus, says Halewood, the solidarity of the universe is not between contemporaries; it is about legacy and inheritance.
Character: The inheritance of the past actual world by the present, or to put it another way, the transition of the past into the present, is not merely abstract. It is a transportation of the character of past actual entities. This character is not simply the result of abstract patterns being imposed upon them; it is how they felt or perceived the world in their process of coming into existence. The character of a past actual entity, as transported into the future, is its objectified "how-ness."
Eternal Objects: For Halewood, eternal objects are the "fulcrum" between an object, which was once a subject and felt in a certain way, and a nascent subject, which then feels those feelings in a certain way. Eternal objects are the means by which the character of a subject, once a subject and now transformed into an object, is transported into a new subject.
The Body: Whereas some interpreters of Whitehead see eternal objects as primarily objects of intellectual feeling, Halewood emphasizes their role in bodily experience as the sensa of experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. In human life, says Halewood, eternal objects are always experienced through the body and thus through sensory experience.
Transmutation: The perception of a world that is itself a community of subjects, or better, a community of communities of communities, occurs through transmutation. This, for Halewood, is how imperceptible actual entities become perceived as bodily objects, that is, as nexuses of eternal objects. The past actual world, as a metaphysical solidarity, becomes a bodily perceived world. Through experience, the real potentiality of the extensive continuum becomes an extended world of bodily perception.
The Future: Halewood notes that, for Whitehead, the extensive continuum is also part of the way that the future is present in the present, even as non-predetermined. The continuum is a real potential for solidarity that will be effective in what we call "the future" no less than it has been present in what we call "the past." When we anticipate the future, the continuum is part of what we anticipate.
Two Kinds of Whiteheadian Thinking: Halewood speaks of two kinds of Whiteheadian thinking. One way envisions actual entities as abstract and imperceptible: objects of intellectual inquiry. The other envisions single moments of human experience as actual entities in their own right, and thus perceptible in this sense. He leans toward the first form; I lean toward the second. Nevertheless, he is deeply interested in human experience and in our social relations amid it. Hence his interest in community, which is different from solidarity.
Vagueness: One value of his presentation is his recognition that our sense of community, as mediated by sense experience, is inevitably vague. He situates the vagueness in terms of transmutation, but I think he could also situate it in terms of Whitehead's idea that conscious experience is only the tip of the experiential iceberg, that intuition is as necessary as perception, and that perception itself is informed by causal efficacy no less than presentational immediacy. In any case, the vagueness of our experience of the world and our negotiation of relations with the world is important to recognize and emphasize. He does so.
Residual Questions:
I end this comments with two questions concerning standpoints and God.
1. No two occasions have identical actual worlds, says Whitehead. Each feels its own actual world from a particular "regional standpoint" in the extensive continuum. This way of putting it suggests that the standpoint preexists the entities' prehensions of the actual world, such that the entity occupies or atomizes it. How or what decides this standpoint? Whitehead suggests a possible answer: the primordial nature of God could play a role in this decision:
"In the mere extensive continuum there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall be atomized, so as to form the real perspective standpoint for the primary data constituting the basic phase in the concrescence of an actual entity. The factors in the actual world whereby this determination is effected will be discussed at a later stage of this investigation. They constitute the initial phase of the ‘subjective aim.’ This initial phase is a direct derivate from God's primordial nature."
Note: Halewood does not mention God in his talk. He offers "Some thoughts on the extensive continuum" but does not claim to address the entirety of it, whatever that may be. Nevertheless, the question of the divine, or perhaps the "ultimate," looms large in any discussion of a continuum that is so deeply tied to the fabric of reality itself. Even if Halewood does not explicitly address it, the question remains: what role, if any, does the divine play in our understanding and experience of this extensive continuum?
2. Another question is: what role does the extensive continuum play in the life of God, particularly God's consequent nature. If we think of the consequent nature as that side of God which everlastingly receives the entirety of the universe into its constitution, weaving whatever beauty and meaning it can weave from what is received, it would follow that God, too, has a standpoint within the extensive continuum. Presumably, this standpoint would overlap with all the standpoints of the universe, such that God would be, as it were, everywhere at once, yet always in process. Not that God creates the continuum, but that God is coextensive with it, whatever it is. This would suggest that the solidarity of the universe is also a community: a diversity that is held together, not only as the real potential of things to become one, but as an actuality wherein the universe is indeed one, even amid its divergences.
For my part, I am grateful to Halewood for his ideas about a feature of Whitehead's philosophy - the extensive continuum - that I, too, find challenging, mysterious, and interestingly relevant to embodied life. I realize that many people think of Whitehead's philosophy in mathematical terms; I think of in existential terms. With his discussions of transmutation, sensa, and bodily life, it seems to me that Halewood does, too. He brings the extensive continuum to life such that it becomes relevant, not only to speculative considerations of time and space, but to the inevitable extensiveness of embodied life, here and now, in all its vagueness.
*
If we think of "reality" in overly physical terms, we will miss the continuum even as it is everywhere present. It is not divided into units, even though what is within it, the things that atomize it, are dividable. In itself, it cannot be defined in terms of shapes, dimensions, or measurability. It is extensiveness as such, understood as a factor in all experience.
Some imagine this continuum as a space-time continuum, albeit potential but not actual. It is populated by regions that are then atomized by actual events: a placeless place that is atomized and occupied by actual entities but nevertheless transcends them. Its regions may include eleven dimensions and much more — all potential forms of extensiveness imaginable by mathematicians, which may or may not be actualized.
Michael Halewood does not use this language, which, for him and perhaps also for Whitehead, would be too Newtonian. Nevertheless, Halewood insists that the continuum—shapeless, dimensionless, and immeasurable—is real in the sense of being really experienced, albeit not as an object among objects in the past actual world. It is the real potentiality of the past actual world becoming unified as it is passing into the present.
If we need to assign it an ontological status, then the phrase "real potentiality" is the closest we come. Not a place but a potentiality, "experienceable" but not "picturable."
Real but not Actual: Unlike actual entities which, according to Whitehead's ontological principle, are the "reasons" why things happen as they do, the extensive continuum does not have feelings of its own and does not make decisions. It does not actualize possibilities, be they those possibilities of eternal objects (pure potentialities) or propositions (lures for feeling). It is not an agent among agents. It does not explain why the world, as it is—happy or sad, just or unjust, tragic or beautiful—is "as it is."
Principle of Relativity: Still, it is a feature of all experience: human experience, atomic experience, cellular experience, stellar experience, ancestral experience, and perhaps also divine experience. In any given part of our universe, and in any given epoch in the history of the universe, the extensive continuum is present and experienced as real potentiality. Halewood links it with Whitehead's principle of relativity: the idea that all entities are "present in" all others. He does not say it, but I will: Even the divine reality, even God, partakes of the real potentiality of the continuum, inasmuch as the past actual world is forever transported into the divine life by means of the solidarity of the universe, which is at the heart of the continuum.
Solidarity: Part of the extensive continuum's reality, and thus its "experienceability," pertains to the fact that, in any given moment of experience, we inherit a past actual world that exhibits solidarity. In Whitehead's philosophy, solidarity is different from community. The "solidarity" of the universe is that of one thing following many others: the passing on of the world into the present, by means of which one thing is "present in" another that succeeds it. Thus, says Halewood, the solidarity of the universe is not between contemporaries; it is about legacy and inheritance.
Character: The inheritance of the past actual world by the present, or to put it another way, the transition of the past into the present, is not merely abstract. It is a transportation of the character of past actual entities. This character is not simply the result of abstract patterns being imposed upon them; it is how they felt or perceived the world in their process of coming into existence. The character of a past actual entity, as transported into the future, is its objectified "how-ness."
Eternal Objects: For Halewood, eternal objects are the "fulcrum" between an object, which was once a subject and felt in a certain way, and a nascent subject, which then feels those feelings in a certain way. Eternal objects are the means by which the character of a subject, once a subject and now transformed into an object, is transported into a new subject.
The Body: Whereas some interpreters of Whitehead see eternal objects as primarily objects of intellectual feeling, Halewood emphasizes their role in bodily experience as the sensa of experience in the mode of presentational immediacy. In human life, says Halewood, eternal objects are always experienced through the body and thus through sensory experience.
Transmutation: The perception of a world that is itself a community of subjects, or better, a community of communities of communities, occurs through transmutation. This, for Halewood, is how imperceptible actual entities become perceived as bodily objects, that is, as nexuses of eternal objects. The past actual world, as a metaphysical solidarity, becomes a bodily perceived world. Through experience, the real potentiality of the extensive continuum becomes an extended world of bodily perception.
The Future: Halewood notes that, for Whitehead, the extensive continuum is also part of the way that the future is present in the present, even as non-predetermined. The continuum is a real potential for solidarity that will be effective in what we call "the future" no less than it has been present in what we call "the past." When we anticipate the future, the continuum is part of what we anticipate.
Two Kinds of Whiteheadian Thinking: Halewood speaks of two kinds of Whiteheadian thinking. One way envisions actual entities as abstract and imperceptible: objects of intellectual inquiry. The other envisions single moments of human experience as actual entities in their own right, and thus perceptible in this sense. He leans toward the first form; I lean toward the second. Nevertheless, he is deeply interested in human experience and in our social relations amid it. Hence his interest in community, which is different from solidarity.
Vagueness: One value of his presentation is his recognition that our sense of community, as mediated by sense experience, is inevitably vague. He situates the vagueness in terms of transmutation, but I think he could also situate it in terms of Whitehead's idea that conscious experience is only the tip of the experiential iceberg, that intuition is as necessary as perception, and that perception itself is informed by causal efficacy no less than presentational immediacy. In any case, the vagueness of our experience of the world and our negotiation of relations with the world is important to recognize and emphasize. He does so.
Residual Questions:
I end this comments with two questions concerning standpoints and God.
1. No two occasions have identical actual worlds, says Whitehead. Each feels its own actual world from a particular "regional standpoint" in the extensive continuum. This way of putting it suggests that the standpoint preexists the entities' prehensions of the actual world, such that the entity occupies or atomizes it. How or what decides this standpoint? Whitehead suggests a possible answer: the primordial nature of God could play a role in this decision:
"In the mere extensive continuum there is no principle to determine what regional quanta shall be atomized, so as to form the real perspective standpoint for the primary data constituting the basic phase in the concrescence of an actual entity. The factors in the actual world whereby this determination is effected will be discussed at a later stage of this investigation. They constitute the initial phase of the ‘subjective aim.’ This initial phase is a direct derivate from God's primordial nature."
Note: Halewood does not mention God in his talk. He offers "Some thoughts on the extensive continuum" but does not claim to address the entirety of it, whatever that may be. Nevertheless, the question of the divine, or perhaps the "ultimate," looms large in any discussion of a continuum that is so deeply tied to the fabric of reality itself. Even if Halewood does not explicitly address it, the question remains: what role, if any, does the divine play in our understanding and experience of this extensive continuum?
2. Another question is: what role does the extensive continuum play in the life of God, particularly God's consequent nature. If we think of the consequent nature as that side of God which everlastingly receives the entirety of the universe into its constitution, weaving whatever beauty and meaning it can weave from what is received, it would follow that God, too, has a standpoint within the extensive continuum. Presumably, this standpoint would overlap with all the standpoints of the universe, such that God would be, as it were, everywhere at once, yet always in process. Not that God creates the continuum, but that God is coextensive with it, whatever it is. This would suggest that the solidarity of the universe is also a community: a diversity that is held together, not only as the real potential of things to become one, but as an actuality wherein the universe is indeed one, even amid its divergences.
For my part, I am grateful to Halewood for his ideas about a feature of Whitehead's philosophy - the extensive continuum - that I, too, find challenging, mysterious, and interestingly relevant to embodied life. I realize that many people think of Whitehead's philosophy in mathematical terms; I think of in existential terms. With his discussions of transmutation, sensa, and bodily life, it seems to me that Halewood does, too. He brings the extensive continuum to life such that it becomes relevant, not only to speculative considerations of time and space, but to the inevitable extensiveness of embodied life, here and now, in all its vagueness.