​The Universe in a Grain of Sand

Whitehead's Relational Ontology
​

“The principle of universal relativity directly traverses Aristotle’s dictum, ‘A substance is not present in a subject.’ On the contrary, according to this principle an actual entity is present in other actual entities. In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity. The philosophy of organism is mainly devoted to the task of making clear the notion of ‘being present in another entity.’ This phrase is here borrowed from Aristotle: it is not a fortunate phrase, and in subsequent discussion it will be replaced by the term ‘objectification.’”

— Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”
​
— William Blake, “Auguries of Innocence”

Commentary

In order to understand Whitehead’s philosophy—and to live into a relational ontology—it is not enough to see individual entities, a grain of sand for example, as enfolded within larger wholes. We must also see the entities in those larger wholes as enfolded within the grain of sand, as immanent within it. In the spirit of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, we are invited to see heaven in a wildflower and a world in a grain of sand. Whitehead tells us that a central purpose of his philosophy is to help us recognize this very idea: that even as actual entities transcend one another, they are also immanent within one another. This is true of finite actual entities and of the divine actual entity. The universe and God transcend one another and are immanent within one another.

Actual Entities as Moments of Experience

For Whitehead, an actual entity is not a corpuscular object that travels through space—not like a billiard ball rolling across a table, a planet moving through the sky, or a car proceeding through an intersection. It is a momentary event or “happening,” endowed with its own interiority or subjectivity, coming into existence with what Whitehead calls subjective immediacy. A familiar example is a single moment of human experience: the internal happening of what occurs as, say, a person crosses a street—the qualitative feel of that moment as lived from the inside, in its immediate uniqueness.

We might picture her crossing the street as a sequence in a film, each frame a discrete clip. Each moment of her experience is an actual entity—each a tiny pulse of subjectivity. She is, in Whitehead’s language, a concrescing subject: a subject coming into being in the immediacy of that moment.

A Universe of Pulsations, Not Things

Whitehead proposes that something analogous—not identical, but analogous—is occurring throughout the universe. Even what we take to be a single physical event, such as a car crossing the street, is not one energy-event at all, but a vast nexus (Whitehead’s term) of energy-events composing the physical body of the car. The car is a corpuscular “society” of actual entities, bound together by patterns of repetition, inheritance, and organization that give it the appearance of being a single thing.

Influenced by early quantum mechanics, Whitehead extended this insight downward into matter itself. Even an energy-event within an atom is, for him, a momentary happening; and in combination with others, it contributes to the emergence of atoms, molecules, and the macroscopic structures we observe. The entire universe—with its billions of stars and galaxies—is, on this view, an unfathomably rich network of actual entities, each a pulse of becoming contributing something of itself to the creative advance of the world.

Objective Immortality and the Afterlife of a Moment

Actual entities are momentary. Once the concrescing subject completes its becoming—once it achieves its determinate character—its subjective immediacy perishes. But it does not vanish. It becomes an object for others, contributing some aspect of its realized character to subsequent events. In Whitehead’s terms, it becomes objectively immortal: it transcends itself by living on in the experiences of future actualities.

Subjective Aliveness and Decision

During its becoming, an actual entity is filled with agency and aliveness—what Whitehead calls “reality for itself.” It has prehensions (feelings), subjective forms (emotions), a desire for satisfaction, and a capacity for decision: a capacity to determine how it will respond to what is “present in” it from others. It enjoys a kind of privacy, yet this privacy is inseparable from the objects that partly constitute it. Its singularity—its oneness—is a novel togetherness. It is many as well as one.

Questions 

From this perspective, many questions arise for scholars.

How, if at all, are future entities “present in” their predecessors? One answer is that they are not present at all, because they do not yet exist. Another is that they are present only as contingent possibilities—as things that might be.

Another question concerns God. Is the multitude of the universe present in God as part of the objective content of the divine life? Is God, too, a many as well as a one? Whitehead’s answer is yes. He describes this side of God as the consequent nature of God, suggesting that—unlike other entities—the manyness of God emerges consequent to the happenings of the world, not prior to them.

A third question concerns the relations of contemporary entities. If, as Whitehead maintains, they are causally independent—neither deriving from nor determining one another—how, then, are they “present in” one another? How can mutual immanence be true even when direct causal influence is not?

And still another concerns the question of distance. Can entities far removed from one another be “present in” one another directly, or is such presence necessarily mediated by the intervening chain of events that links them? Whitehead offers one way they can be directly present: through what he calls hybrid physical prehensions. These are prehensions in which an actual entity feels not only the physical effects of another entity but also some aspect of that entity’s conceptual functioning or subjective form. In such cases, the distant entity is not fully mediated by the intervening series of events; instead, something of its valuing, interpreting, or responding is felt directly.

Together, these questions point to a central theme in Whitehead’s thought: the presence of one entity in another is multifaceted, involving possibilities, feelings, objective contributions, conceptual patterns, and—in the case of hybrid prehensions—even the faint reverberation of another’s subjective life.

Mutual Immanence 

These and related questions deserve extended discussion, but they should not obscure the central sensibility Whitehead is expressing: one way or another, actual entities are immanent within others, and others are immanent within them. This mutual immanence is not an incidental feature of reality but a fundamental truth about how things exist and become. It reveals a universe in which nothing stands wholly apart, where each moment of experience arises from the world that is part of its very existence, and in turn contributes itself back to the world.

Mutual Transcendence

Mutual immanence does not imply fusion or sameness. For Whitehead, actual entities are also mutually transcendent: each exceeds the data it receives, adding something new and uniquely its own. Even though every actual entity inherits the world—prehending it, feeling it, integrating it—it does not merely repeat what is given. Each entity gathers the multiplicity of its experienced world into a singular unity that no other entity will ever replicate. This unique gathering is an act of self-creation. It involves:

• a private standpoint, a moment of vision that belongs to no one else;
• a subjective aim, an inward drive toward some form of harmony or intensity;
• a decision, however minute, by which it shapes how it will feel, interpret, and respond to what is present within it.

In this sense, each actual entity transcends the entities immanent within it. It transforms what it inherits into something novel—into the “one” that the many become. And this new one, once achieved, becomes an influence on future actualities, yet never collapses back into the very events that shaped it.

Mutual transcendence, then, complements mutual immanence. Actual entities are inside one another, yet each is also a flare of uniqueness that can never be reduced to its predecessors. The universe, on this view, is an ongoing process woven from two inseparable movements: the way the world enters into each becoming, and the way each becoming brings something unprecedented into the world.

Spiritual Awareness and Inter-Becoming

It is imaginable that certain forms of spiritual awareness awaken directly to this mutual immanence. A person may sense the world as inwardly present in each moment of their becoming, and themselves as inwardly present in the becoming of others—a felt realization of the inter-becoming that Whitehead’s philosophy describes.

Supported by spiritual practices, community, and ritual, such intuition can foster wisdom and compassion. To sense oneself as inwardly connected with others is to recognize that one’s well-being is intertwined with the well-being of the wider world. This awareness can inspire gentleness, responsibility, and a widening circle of empathy—encouraging a way of living that honors the relational fabric of reality.