Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension (Thinking with Tim Jackson and Charles Hartshorne)

Tim Jackson and I discussed Hartshorne’s article, “Whitehead’s Revolutionary Concept of Prehension.”

Charles Hartshorne offers a detailed and insightful examination of Alfred North Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy. Hartshorne, who served as Whitehead’s assistant at Harvard University during the 1920s, was also profoundly influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce, whose papers he edited during that same period. This background helps explain Hartshorne’s unique approach to interpreting Whitehead’s ideas on relations, creativity, and God.

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Hartshorne’s Classification of Whitehead as a Qualified Pluralist

Hartshorne classifies Whitehead as a “qualified pluralist.” While philosophers like Bertrand Russell also affirmed pluralism, they tended toward what Hartshorne calls extreme or Humean pluralism, allowing only external relations among distinct entities. Whitehead, on the other hand, maintains that actual occasions—his ultimate units of reality—are internally related to one another, at least with respect to their past, even if they remain externally related to future possibilities.

In contrast to Russell’s strict rejection of internal relations, Whitehead’s process-relational ontology embraces them: each new occasion of experience inherits and synthesizes data from past occasions. Russell’s overreaction against what he perceived to be Francis Herbert Bradley’s doctrine of internal relations partly explains his externalist stance. Bradley had actually argued that any relation—whether internal or external—leads to logical incoherence and infinite regress, thus requiring an all-encompassing Absolute. Russell, misunderstanding Bradley, swung to the opposite extreme of logical atomism. Whitehead stands in the middle, offering a novel account of how new actualities are internally related to their past conditions but remain open to external, not-yet-determinate possibilities in the future.

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Prehension as an Asymmetric Relation

Hartshorne emphasizes that for Whitehead, prehension is an asymmetric form of relation: each new actual occasion is internally linked to the concrete realities of its past but is only externally related to the realm of future possibility. This asymmetry underscores Whitehead’s metaphysical acount of creative advance, which insists that the past and future are not symmetrical.

• Past as Determinate, Future as Vague
  In Whitehead’s scheme, past actualities are fully determinate and feed physical data into new occasions of becoming. The future, by contrast, is vaguer: we conceptually prehend merely possible forms, or in Whitehead’s language, “eternal objects.”
• Concrescence and the Creative Advance
  Whitehead calls the internal unification process of these past data with novel possibilities “concrescence.” As an occasion of experience concresces, it becomes a new creative synthesis. Once it completes its moment of becoming, it “perishes” as a subject and becomes a “superject,” offering itself as data for future occasions. This cycle is epitomized in Whitehead’s statement that “the many become one and are increased by one.”

Hartshorne contrasts this approach to causality with Russell’s symmetrical external relations: for Whitehead, the past shapes and conditions the present, but it does not determine it. There is novelty in each act of becoming, so that while past occasions are necessary conditions, they are not sufficient to fix the exact outcome of the concrescence.

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Substance Pluralism vs. Process Pluralism

A central theme Hartshorne stresses is Whitehead’s departure from substance-based metaphysics, in which enduring entities maintain their identity through time. Whitehead and Hartshorne instead embrace a process pluralism, where momentary “quanta of becoming” or actual occasions compose reality. For Whitehead, it is not that we have a “continuity of becoming,” but rather a “becoming of continuity.” Reality emerges from countless discrete pulses of experience. Each pulse, or occasion, inherits from many past data and then adds a novel unity, itself, back to the many. It is a process that functions relationally by turning many-into-one and one-into many.

This event-based ontology has parallels in Buddhist thought—particularly the Abhidharma notion of momentary dharmas and the idea of dependent origination. Each dharma or momentary psychophysical event arises, depends on prior conditions, and swiftly perishes, giving rise to an interlinked network of events rather than substantial things. Whitehead’s actual occasions can be seen as having been prefigured in by such dharmas.

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Memory, Perception, and Causality

Hartshorne clarifies how Whitehead’s concept of prehension underlies both memory and perception. These two modes differ only in whether the data being prehended come from the same personal series of occasions (memory) or from an environment outside that series (perception).

• Memory is the present occasion’s prehension of perished occasions in the social lineage of its historical route. Rather than a single enduring subject remembering itself, we have successive moments in a personal series causally linked together. Each new moment inherits the data of the earlier moments, yet does so creatively rather than by sheer identity over time.
• Perception is the prehension of past events lying outside one’s personal series. My present experience incorporates the data of others’ experiences and the world at large, but not via an identity relation—rather, via causal influence transmitted across multiple levels of relational societies.
• Causality Is Not Identity: Whitehead’s process perspective posits that we are not one entity persisting in time. Instead, we are a “stream” of arising and perishing experiences in intimate relation with one another, each prehending the data of its predecessors. This is why Hartshorne says that “self-awareness is not simultaneous prehension”: we do not fully grasp the organic, cellular, or subcellular processes that enable us to raise our arm, for example. A vast network of vector feelings occurs—well below the threshold of conscious awareness—to persuade the muscle cells in our arm to contract.

Here I could draw a parallel to Rudolf Steiner’s claim that it is in our willing that we are most asleep. Willing remains largely unconscious because of the intricate chain of bodily persuasion required for any voluntary act.

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Real Potentiality of Past and Future

A key element of Whitehead’s philosophy is his recognition that both past and future constitute real potentialities for the present, though in distinct ways.

• Past Determinate Potentiality: Past actualities are determinate; they have already happened. Yet we also feel the contrast of what might have happened but did not. Past events carry a “halo” of unrealized possibilities that inform our sense of what has value or meaning in the present.
• Future as Vague Potentiality: The future is vague in that it lacks determined actuality. It is partly governed by chance and partly by necessity, leaving room for novelty in each concrescence. While the past is determinate and can be physically inherited, the future is conceptually open, a graded network of more or less vague possibilities for actualization.
• Condition vs. Determination: In Whitehead’s scheme, the past conditions but does not determine the present. Each actual occasion synthesizes and transforms inherited conditions into a new emergent unity.

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Hartshorne’s Debate with Whitehead over Eternal Objects

Although Hartshorne greatly admires Whitehead, he acknowledges a philosophical difference concerning eternal objects—the Platonic-like realm of pure possibilities. Hartshorne believes that everything Whitehead seeks to accomplish with eternal objects could be achieved through physical prehensions alone, so long as there is a minimal sense of futurity and contrast among prehended data.

Yet Hartshorne concedes that Whitehead’s reference to God’s primordial nature largely resolves the same issue. Whitehead eventually diminishes the independent role of conceptual reversion (in Process and Reality, p. 249-50) by suggesting that God’s primordial nature already provides a sense of the graduated intensive relevance of possibilities to each finite occasion. Whitehead and Hartshorne’s views overlap more than it might initially seem. Both agree that actual occasions inherit conceptual valuations of relevant possibilities, and that God plays a crucial role in organizing and offering these possibilities for actualization.

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Consciousness vs. Experience: Most Experience Is Unconscious

Hartshorne underscores Whitehead’s principle that consciousness and experience are not synonymous. We often conflate the two, assuming that all experience is, in some measure, conscious or propositional. Whitehead argues that most of reality’s prehensive activity is unconscious, and that consciousness is merely a specialized function arising in more complex societies of occasions.

• Self-Awareness is Not the Same as Experiencing
  The “how” of experience can become a “what” in subsequent memory or introspection; we can reflect on how we perceived or felt something only after the fact. But in the moment, the majority of prehensions remain indistinct and non-propositional (a how without a what).
• God’s Perfect Prehensions
  In contrast, Hartshorne notes that only God has perfectly distinct prehensions. Finite creatures, especially on simpler levels like cells or atoms, prehend very vaguely. Yet all events in nature remain experientially interlinked through prehension, whether conscious or not.

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The Iterative and Cumulative Nature of Creativity

Whitehead’s concept of concrescence involves the iterative and cumulative transition from many to one and back to many. Once a new occasion completes its moment of synthesis, it perishes as a subject but remains objectively immortal as data for the next generations of occasions. This cyclical pattern accounts for Whitehead’s creative advance: reality is continually in the making, rather than being simply given once and for all.

Hartshorne clarifies that while actual occasions are necessary preconditions for future events, they are never sufficient to fix the outcome. This underpins the probabilistic nature of knowledge and scientific inquiry. We can make statistical or probabilistic judgments about the future so long as we assume the continued existence of certain stable social environments.

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Why Philosophy Took 2,500 Years to Invent Prehension: Hartshorne’s Sixteen Bad Mental Habits

In his article, Hartshorne speculates about why it took Western philosophy millennia to develop a concept as useful and elucidating as prehension. He identifies sixteen “bad mental habits” that blocked prior philosophers from fully articulating Whitehead’s insight:

1. Subject-predicate grammar and the neglect of relative predicates.
2. Choosing a thing-ontology over an event-ontology.
3. Overreliance on common sense and ordinary language to settle profound metaphysical questions.
4. Fascination with symmetry in logic and mathematics, leading to false assumptions about symmetrical relations in reality.
5. The alleged simultaneous identity of perceiver with perceived, memory with data, and mind with body.
6. Determinism, or the symmetrical pairing of cause and effect.
7. Hume’s axiom that to distinguish is to separate (failure to see that we can “distinguish without dividing”).
8. The idea of a continuity of becoming, rather than a becoming of continuity.
9. Confusions of the given with the known-to-be-given, memory with known-to-be-remembered, and so on.
10. Belief in a neutral, emotionless qualia, instead of seeing prehensions as always clothed in emotion and purpose (subjective form and subjective aim).
11. The theory of mind as inextended, which sets up incoherent positions like dualism or materialism.
12. Anthropophobia or the dread of anthropomorphism—denying any analogy between human experience and more general forms of feeling in nature.
13. God as an unmoved mover, outside time, rather than as a fellow sufferer or participant who prehends and is prehended by the world.
14. The assumption that time is timeless, or that truth is timeless, negating genuine novelty.
15. Nominalism, taken too far to deny real potentialities or universals of any kind.
16. A non-intentional, non-modal logic, ignoring the real openness of the future.

Hartshorne contends that Whitehead overcame many of these difficulties by introducing prehension. Even so, Hartshorne believes that, with his doctrine of eternal objects, Whitehead overcorrected for nominalism. Nonetheless, Whitehead remains, in Hartshorne’s estimation, the thinker who most systematically broke through the confusions that had prevented earlier philosophers from conceiving the world as an ever-evolving network of momentary acts of (mostly) blind perceptivity.