Where is the Individual Subject
in Whitehead's Philosophy?
Six Fallacies to Avoid
Finally, the reformed subjectivist principle must be repeated: that apart from the experiences of subjects there is nothing, nothing, nothing, bare nothingness.
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The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.’
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There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.
- AN Whitehead
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The organic philosophy interprets experience as meaning the ‘self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of many.’
*
There is a becoming of continuity, but no continuity of becoming.
- AN Whitehead
If you are reading these words at this moment, you are—whatever else may be true—an individual subject of experience. Or, perhaps better, you are an activity of becoming a subject, emerging out of your own past actual world. I am, too.
As with me, you have not created the entirety of the past actual world, you have arisen from it, as a first-person responder to what you are now receiving. This first-person response, with its physical feelings, mental feeling, subjective aims, and emotions, are what Whitehead calls your "subjective immeciacy." You are responding to your own past, to other people, to plants and animals, to memories, to the circumstances of your life as given from the past, These words are among the many objects you are receiving. Your interpretation of them is your first-person response.
Who, then, is this person? I might have instead said "What are you?" That would turn you into an object: a thing to be analyzed from a distance. I say let's avoid what language for a moment. You can think of your you as a noun or a verb: a fixed object or an active event. I suggest the second option. Try thinking of you as a verb or, perhaps even better, an adverb. How you experience and respond to the world is who you are becoming here and now.
Moreover, it seems to me that you are a you-in-process. The idea that you are one moment and then the next and then the next is a spectator perspective. It is as if you are on a shore watching the moments pass by. I suggest that you are not on the shore; you are in the river. And I am, too. Whitehead writes that there is a becoming of continuity even as there are moments that thus become. I suggest that you are this becoming.
You may be changing from moment to moment. Your thoughts may be flitting, scattered, or half-formed. You may feel fragmented, distracted, or preoccupied with something else entirely. And yet, even so, there is a here-and-now in which you are prehending these words, feeling them in some way, and trying—however loosely—to make sense of them, from a particular point of view, namely your own at this moment.
And even if you are inclined to deny that you are a center of experience, a question immediately arises: who, or what, is doing the denying? The very activity of questioning, doubting, or rejecting already presupposes a subject of experience—however momentary, however fluid. That is what I mean by a center of experience. I mean you.
Any philosophy that obscures or denies this lived reality—this immediacy of being a subject of experience—is, at least to that extent, phenomenologically inadequate. It may tell us a lot about the cosmos, but it excludes the 'you' who is reflecting on that cosmos.
The Universality of Subjective Immediacy
Conceptually we may try to 'explain' you-ness by appeal to the brain or the body. We may speak of it as a 'product' of brain chemistry or social relations. But again the question is: Who is speaking in this way? Who is reducing the you to a what? It is, I suggest, you. Whitehead scholar often speak of their cosmology as panexperiential, seeing something like subjectivity and experiencing subjects everywhere. It could also be called pan-you-ness.
And yet, even within process-relational thought, there are tendencies that can lead in precisely this direction. What follows are six fallacies that, in different ways, risk eclipsing the living subject.
As with me, you have not created the entirety of the past actual world, you have arisen from it, as a first-person responder to what you are now receiving. This first-person response, with its physical feelings, mental feeling, subjective aims, and emotions, are what Whitehead calls your "subjective immeciacy." You are responding to your own past, to other people, to plants and animals, to memories, to the circumstances of your life as given from the past, These words are among the many objects you are receiving. Your interpretation of them is your first-person response.
Who, then, is this person? I might have instead said "What are you?" That would turn you into an object: a thing to be analyzed from a distance. I say let's avoid what language for a moment. You can think of your you as a noun or a verb: a fixed object or an active event. I suggest the second option. Try thinking of you as a verb or, perhaps even better, an adverb. How you experience and respond to the world is who you are becoming here and now.
Moreover, it seems to me that you are a you-in-process. The idea that you are one moment and then the next and then the next is a spectator perspective. It is as if you are on a shore watching the moments pass by. I suggest that you are not on the shore; you are in the river. And I am, too. Whitehead writes that there is a becoming of continuity even as there are moments that thus become. I suggest that you are this becoming.
You may be changing from moment to moment. Your thoughts may be flitting, scattered, or half-formed. You may feel fragmented, distracted, or preoccupied with something else entirely. And yet, even so, there is a here-and-now in which you are prehending these words, feeling them in some way, and trying—however loosely—to make sense of them, from a particular point of view, namely your own at this moment.
And even if you are inclined to deny that you are a center of experience, a question immediately arises: who, or what, is doing the denying? The very activity of questioning, doubting, or rejecting already presupposes a subject of experience—however momentary, however fluid. That is what I mean by a center of experience. I mean you.
Any philosophy that obscures or denies this lived reality—this immediacy of being a subject of experience—is, at least to that extent, phenomenologically inadequate. It may tell us a lot about the cosmos, but it excludes the 'you' who is reflecting on that cosmos.
The Universality of Subjective Immediacy
Conceptually we may try to 'explain' you-ness by appeal to the brain or the body. We may speak of it as a 'product' of brain chemistry or social relations. But again the question is: Who is speaking in this way? Who is reducing the you to a what? It is, I suggest, you. Whitehead scholar often speak of their cosmology as panexperiential, seeing something like subjectivity and experiencing subjects everywhere. It could also be called pan-you-ness.
And yet, even within process-relational thought, there are tendencies that can lead in precisely this direction. What follows are six fallacies that, in different ways, risk eclipsing the living subject.
1. The Fallacy of Smallism
The tendency to locate concrescing subjects only at microscopic or sub-personal levels—as diminutive events in the depths of atoms—while neglecting that moments of human and animal experience are themselves occasions of concrescence. It forgets that process philosophy is not only about what is most minute, but also about what is most immediate in lived experience.
2. The Fallacy of Third-Person Spectatorialism
The tendency to treat moments of experience as if they are only objects to be observed from the outside, rather than realities to be lived from within. It reduces experience to something seen, measured, or described, while neglecting its first-person character as felt, enacted, and undergone.
3. The Fallacy of Relational Erasure
The reduction of individual subjects to relations: a conceptual mistake in which relationality is so emphasized that individuals are no longer recognized as centers of experience with, to use Whitehead’s words, “private” self-enjoyment and self-creativity in their own right.
4. The Fallacy of Holistic Reductionism
Closely related is the tendency to subsume concrete, living individuals into abstract systems or wholes, thereby neglecting their irreducible particularity as subjects of their own lives and not simply objects for others.
5. The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
Connected to this is the well-known fallacy of misplaced concreteness: approaching individual subjects primarily or exclusively as instances of types (e.g., species) or as data within a set, at the expense of their concrete immediacy—their lived, felt existence as subjects of experience in the here and now.
6. The Fallacy of Affective Denial
This is the tendency to treat “relations” as if they were merely logical or structural connections, rather than felt relations—relations that are enjoyed or suffered by individual subjects as they prehend and respond to their actual world.
The tendency to locate concrescing subjects only at microscopic or sub-personal levels—as diminutive events in the depths of atoms—while neglecting that moments of human and animal experience are themselves occasions of concrescence. It forgets that process philosophy is not only about what is most minute, but also about what is most immediate in lived experience.
2. The Fallacy of Third-Person Spectatorialism
The tendency to treat moments of experience as if they are only objects to be observed from the outside, rather than realities to be lived from within. It reduces experience to something seen, measured, or described, while neglecting its first-person character as felt, enacted, and undergone.
3. The Fallacy of Relational Erasure
The reduction of individual subjects to relations: a conceptual mistake in which relationality is so emphasized that individuals are no longer recognized as centers of experience with, to use Whitehead’s words, “private” self-enjoyment and self-creativity in their own right.
4. The Fallacy of Holistic Reductionism
Closely related is the tendency to subsume concrete, living individuals into abstract systems or wholes, thereby neglecting their irreducible particularity as subjects of their own lives and not simply objects for others.
5. The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness
Connected to this is the well-known fallacy of misplaced concreteness: approaching individual subjects primarily or exclusively as instances of types (e.g., species) or as data within a set, at the expense of their concrete immediacy—their lived, felt existence as subjects of experience in the here and now.
6. The Fallacy of Affective Denial
This is the tendency to treat “relations” as if they were merely logical or structural connections, rather than felt relations—relations that are enjoyed or suffered by individual subjects as they prehend and respond to their actual world.
Truth be told, some in the process-relational community fall into these fallacies more often than they might wish to admit—especially when relationality is overemphasized or reduced to a merely logical form of connectedness, and when systems or wholes are privileged at the expense of concrete individuals. In such cases, the living subject risks disappearing into its relations or into the abstractions used to describe them.
And yet, Whitehead’s own philosophy cuts sharply against these tendencies. His explicit commitment to what he himself calls “atomism”—the view that reality is composed of discrete, momentary subjects of experience—places the individual occasion at the center. Each actual entity is a contrasting subject, seeking satisfaction for itself in the immediacy of its becoming, imbued with feelings, prehensions, and a self-creative act of decision. Relationality is real, but it is always felt relationality—experienced from within by a subject, not merely mapped from without.
This emphasis converges with Whitehead’s ontological principle: that the reasons for things are to be found in actual entities themselves, not in abstractions or external systems. To lose sight of the individual subject, then, is not simply to make a minor conceptual error—it is to drift away from the very heart of Whitehead’s vision.
My suggestion, therefore, is straightforward: that Whiteheadians take Whitehead more seriously—not by repeating his vocabulary, but by remaining faithful to his central insight that the ultimate realities are subjects of experience, each with its own immediacy, integrity, and aim.