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Today we know that matter has many forms: solids, liquids, gases, plasmas, and fields—such as electromagnetic and gravitational fields—along with more elusive forms like dark matter and dark energy. In modern physics, matter is now understood not as inert stuff but as dynamic processes of energy and interaction, continuously transforming from one state to another.
Despite this multiplicity, many are still tempted to think that the really real things of the universe are solids—stable, enduring, and self-contained objects. Yet, from both scientific and a process perspective, solidity is an abstraction, a momentary appearance within a deeper flux of relations and activities. The world is not built from blocks of matter but from acts of becoming, each with its own unique mode. Whitehead calls these acts actual entities and writes: “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is.” The word how is crucial: Whitehead offers, in effect, an ontology in which nouns are really verbs, or gerunds. And in which all verbs have their distinctive manners of unfolding—their modes of 'how-ness.' Whitehead offers an ontology of adverbs.
If we truly understood that the universe consists of adverbs—and that Spirit is an adverb, too—we would still love the particularities: plants, animals, people, mountains, trees, and stars. But perhaps we would hold them a little more lightly, loving without clinging, knowing that everything is a manner of becoming rather than a thing that endures. You can love a manner, but you can’t possess it. Love, in an adverbial universe, is not about ownership but about attunement—responding to the way things happen, to their rhythms and unfoldings, without trying to make them stay the same.
Despite this multiplicity, many are still tempted to think that the really real things of the universe are solids—stable, enduring, and self-contained objects. Yet, from both scientific and a process perspective, solidity is an abstraction, a momentary appearance within a deeper flux of relations and activities. The world is not built from blocks of matter but from acts of becoming, each with its own unique mode. Whitehead calls these acts actual entities and writes: “How an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is.” The word how is crucial: Whitehead offers, in effect, an ontology in which nouns are really verbs, or gerunds. And in which all verbs have their distinctive manners of unfolding—their modes of 'how-ness.' Whitehead offers an ontology of adverbs.
If we truly understood that the universe consists of adverbs—and that Spirit is an adverb, too—we would still love the particularities: plants, animals, people, mountains, trees, and stars. But perhaps we would hold them a little more lightly, loving without clinging, knowing that everything is a manner of becoming rather than a thing that endures. You can love a manner, but you can’t possess it. Love, in an adverbial universe, is not about ownership but about attunement—responding to the way things happen, to their rhythms and unfoldings, without trying to make them stay the same.
Adverbial Ontology
Ontology is the study of the 'being' of beings. In this context 'being' is not simply a property among properties, such as color or shape or size. You cannot simply add properties together in your mind and get, for example, an actual, round red ball. Something else must be added: existence itself. Existence is not a potentiality among potentialities, or a formal property among formal properties. It is not a pure potentiality.
It is the actualization of potentialities: an act of coming into being. Whitehead speaks of this activity as concrescence: the activity of becoming concrete. The 'being' of a being is both its becoming concrete and the concreteness it becomes. Whitehead puts it this way:
It is the actualization of potentialities: an act of coming into being. Whitehead speaks of this activity as concrescence: the activity of becoming concrete. The 'being' of a being is both its becoming concrete and the concreteness it becomes. Whitehead puts it this way:
"How an actual entity becomes constitutes what an actual entity is."
This phrase appears twice in Process and Reality (pp. 23 and 166) and in both instances the terms "how" and "what" are italicized.
In effect, Whitehead offers an adverbial ontology—an adverbial way of understanding what the being of being is. Adverbial ontology does not say that does not say that the only “really real” things are grammatical adverbs. It say that they are "really real" and that they are acts of becoming, which means that they are like verbs, and it adds that each act of becoming unfolds in a particular way, mode, or manner that is uniquely its own, There are no acts of becoming as such; there are only acts of becoming as qualified and defined by their adverbial qualities—their distinctive ways of becoming. There are no verbs without adverbs.
Whitehead elucidates this further by appealing to certain subjective features of an act of becoming. These, I suggests are its adverbiality. They cannot be grasped as objects among objects; they are instead modes of becoming.
This definiteness is its whatness. The act of cutting off some possibilities while actualizing others is what Whitehead calls "decision"—or, alternatively, its act of "self-creativity." Importantly, this decision is not preceded or overseen by a preexistent decider. The act of deciding is the decider; the act of self-creativity is the agent.
This means that there is a spontaneity within the very depths of every actual entity - a spontaneity that is not reducible to the past actual world, to a realm of pure potentials, or to a divine source. This spontaneity is part of the heart of being. In Whitehead's words:
This phrase appears twice in Process and Reality (pp. 23 and 166) and in both instances the terms "how" and "what" are italicized.
In effect, Whitehead offers an adverbial ontology—an adverbial way of understanding what the being of being is. Adverbial ontology does not say that does not say that the only “really real” things are grammatical adverbs. It say that they are "really real" and that they are acts of becoming, which means that they are like verbs, and it adds that each act of becoming unfolds in a particular way, mode, or manner that is uniquely its own, There are no acts of becoming as such; there are only acts of becoming as qualified and defined by their adverbial qualities—their distinctive ways of becoming. There are no verbs without adverbs.
Whitehead elucidates this further by appealing to certain subjective features of an act of becoming. These, I suggests are its adverbiality. They cannot be grasped as objects among objects; they are instead modes of becoming.
- feelings (prehensions) of objects (data) from the past actual world and a world of potentialities;
- emotional tones (subjective forms) of those feelings;
- aiming at satisfaction (subjective aim) amid those feelings;
- cutting off some potentialities for responding to what is given while at the same time actualizing others, so as to achieve definiteness or specificity.
This definiteness is its whatness. The act of cutting off some possibilities while actualizing others is what Whitehead calls "decision"—or, alternatively, its act of "self-creativity." Importantly, this decision is not preceded or overseen by a preexistent decider. The act of deciding is the decider; the act of self-creativity is the agent.
This means that there is a spontaneity within the very depths of every actual entity - a spontaneity that is not reducible to the past actual world, to a realm of pure potentials, or to a divine source. This spontaneity is part of the heart of being. In Whitehead's words:
"But ‘decision’ cannot be construed as a casual adjunct of an actual entity. It constitutes the very meaning of actuality. An actual entity arises from decisions for it, and by its very existence provides decisions for other actual entities which supersede it." (PR, 43)
In a Whiteheadian context, then, agency is the activity of coming-into-being with a unique modality and the outcome of that act with its unique whatness. He speaks of the act of coming-into-being as the 'subject' of the act and the outcome of that act as the 'superject' of that act.
Accordingly, Whitehead offers two complementary ways of analyzing what a thing is.
Genetic division examines the internal phases of concrescence—the process by which an entity comes into being through its feelings, integrations, and decisions. This process of becoming is private, but it is not isolated. It is a private concrescence of the public world—and, indeed, of the universe. In this sense, the universe is present in every act of concrescence: the many of the universe “become one” in the entity’s own becoming.
Coordinate division, by contrast, considers how the completed outcome—the superject—is situated within the wider nexus of actual entities. Here the emphasis shifts from the inner genesis of becoming to the outward pattern of relatedness. The entity is now understood as a member of a more inclusive whole—or better, of many overlapping wholes. Coordinate division analyzes how a given entity participates in, and is coordinated with, these relational contexts.
Both forms of understanding - genetic and coordinate - illuminate a world in process. The word process in Whitehead's philosophy refers both to the activity of concrescence and to the perishing of its subjective immediacy, such that others take its place. The latter is the flow of time.
A sense of this flow is implicit with each moment of concrescence. Whitehead proposes that the coming into being of an actual entity includes anticipatory feelings of the undecided future. Thus the 'being' of beings is an act spontaneous or self-creative actualization of potentialities which both feels or "prehends" the past actual world and anticipates a not-yet decided future in a specific way. This specific way is the how-ness, the adverbiality, of an actual entity.
This adverbial vision stands in contrast to the substance-based metaphysics that have shaped much of Western and global thought, where the world is imagined as a collection of things to which properties and actions are added. Whitehead reverses the grammar of being: actuality is not a noun adorned with adjectives but an adverbial happening from which nouns emerge.
A parallel to this vision is found in philosophical Daoism. The Chinese character Dao (道, Pinyin: Dào, Cantonese: Dou), often translated as “Way” or “Path,” variously names the way of ultimate reality, the way of the universe and the way of human life. The Dao is not a static thing but a flowing manner of existence—a cosmic how manifest in “the ten thousand things.” Hills and trees, rivers and stars, people and planets—all are ways way-ing, each expressing its own distinctive manner of existence. These ways—the multiple becomings of the universe—are never isolated. They arise out of their felt connections with other becomings, each with its own tone and rhythm. The universe, then, is a vast network of ways, each way-ing from within its own interiority, yet always in responsive relation to other ways.
To live in an adverbial world is to experience existence - the being of beings - not as a collection of things but as a choreography of living adverbs. In such a world, the fundamental question is never simply what is happening? but how is it happening?—and how am I participating in it?
Everything, including oneself, is defined by manner. Every act, perception, and relation bears a tone—gentle or harsh, open or defensive, hurried or spacious. Living adverbially means being attuned to the world’s rhythms of becoming and syncopating one’s own actions, as best one can, with those that enhance harmony rather than diminish it. It invites sensitivity to nuance: not just what we say but how we say it, not just what we do but how we do it.
Love is the deepest form of constructive how-ness. In process philosophy as in Daoism, the very Mother of the universe is a nurturant power, a kind of love that is everywhere all the time, but never forcing itself. This Mother - this Spirit - is like the Dao of Daoism. Flowing, gracious, humble, nourishing. To live in an adverbial universe is to be attuned to the rhythms of others, to the rhythms of your own heart, and the rhythms of this Spirit.