Was there ever a time before metaphysics? Will there be a time after it? Pre and post, a priori and a posteriori, the here and now and the infinite Beyond: always and everywhere the opposites are meeting and making one another! We can strive to grow out of puerile metaphysics, but the claim to have transcended metaphysics entirely is not a sign of philosophical maturity. It is adolescent rebelliousness. One can no more go “beyond metaphysics” (which is nearly a pleonasm!) than one can step outside language, history, or experience as such. We cannot avoid drowning simply by renaming the ocean something less dangerous sounding (“there is no God, only nature!”). There is no solid ground to stand on that might justify the denial of metaphysics, since that would be to attempt to think beyond what lies beyond. We are always already at sea. All we can do is learn to swim.
Already in The Concept of Nature (1920), Whitehead was resisting the assumption that nature is a mere aggregate of independent material entities passing through empty space and extensionless instants of time. He instead articulates a view of nature as a network of events in patterned relations, where the patterns express the characteristics of said events, which he calls objects.
“…the character of an event is nothing but the objects which are ingredient in it and the ways in which those objects make their ingression into the event. Thus the theory of objects is the theory of the comparison of events. Events are only comparable because they body forth permanences. We are comparing objects in events whenever we can say, ‘There it is again.’ Objects are the elements in nature which can ‘be again.’” (CN, 143-144)
This account is the seed of the later Philosophy of Organism. The world is not built up out of little self-enclosed lumps first given in isolation and only later externally related. The whole pervades the parts, and the parts only are what they are by virtue of their ingression into a larger processive whole.
In The Concept of Nature Whitehead argues that the classical doctrine of matter made a disastrous mistake: it separated the entity from the factor of sense-awareness, turned the entity into a substratum, and degraded the factor into an attribute. This material substratum was thus forever hidden from our actual perception, with its instances only ever entering into accidental external relations with one another (thus making the idea of “laws of nature” incomprehensible and arbitrary imposed, since the laws have no necessary relations to the things said to be in lawful relationship).
I can understand the resistance some feel when they first encounter Whitehead’s eternal objects and the primordial nature of God. I stubbed my toe on them when I first began studying Whitehead’s process ontology in grad school. One jumps into the Heraclitean river and expects to flow unimpeded, but quickly discovers that rivers have rocks and banks. At first glance, Whitehead’s eternal objects can seem like suspicious survivals, relics of ancient metaphysics awkwardly reinserted into what otherwise presents itself as a radically empirical, process-relational onto-epistemology. If actual occasions are the final real things, if Creativity is ultimate, if the world is composed of relational events rather than substances, then why not stop there? Why not let occasions and their prehensions do all the work?
However, after sitting with the problems Whitehead was trying to resolve, not only in his mature metaphysical scheme but in his earlier philosophy of science, I came to appreciate the function these categories play and no longer find them to be expendable. They are not theological ornaments hanging from an otherwise secular account of the heaven-tree.1 They arise from the criteria of his categoreal scheme itself: the need of coherence, that the fundamental notions of the scheme “presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless”; and the need of adequacy, that every feature of our experience, including of patterned potentiality and the felt indeterminacy of a lure, finds interpretation in the scheme. Whitehead is trying to think becoming without collapsing the universe into sheer indiscriminate flux, to think relationality without sacrificing individuality, and to think novelty without reducing it either to randomness or to the mechanical reshuffling of settled facts. Eternal objects and the primordial nature of God arise from this effort.
This becomes clearer if we start where Whitehead starts in The Concept of Nature. There the ultimate fact for sense-awareness is an event. We cannot hold nature still. Nature comes to us as passage, occurrence, happening. But sense-awareness also discloses factors in nature that are not themselves events. The sky is blue, for example. A particular shade of blue has a definite implication in events, appearing only when conditions are ripe; but it is not itself an event. Nature is evental through and through, but events are not exhausted by their eventhood alone. They ingress and express characteristic patterns. And these characteristics can recur, thus allowing for the comparability of events. Objects are the forms amidst the flux of nature that can “be again.”
Objects are not alien to events. They are not substances standing over against process. Nor are they private ideas projected by minds onto an otherwise colorless flux. They are the repeatable ingredients by which events become comparable, characterizable, and so scientifically and metaphysically intelligible. We should dwell on Whitehead’s term “ingression” (which has recently taken up by Michael Levin as part of his Platonic research program in biology). “The ingression of an object into an event is the way the character of the event shapes itself in virtue of the being of the object” (CN 144). But, he qualifies, “it is equally true to say that objects are what they are because events are what they are. Nature is such that there can be no events and no objects without the ingression of objects into events” (ibid.) This is not a new kind of dualism, but a dipolar reciprocity.
By the time Whitehead later speaks of “eternal objects,” he is not suddenly importing a Platonic colonnade into an otherwise Heraclitean event ontology. He is expanding on a problem already present in his philosophy of science: if events pass, what accounts for the recognizable, repeatable, and comparable factors through which events have determinate form? If there were only passing occasions, with no repeatable patterns of definiteness, then the world would be a featureless wash of perishing singularities with no intelligible recurrence and no basis for distinction much less comparison between events. Scientific knowledge would be impossible for the simple reason that science depends on the recurrence of forms across distinct events. No persistent patterns, no science, and no metaphysics.
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It is important to note that Whitehead explicitly denies “predetermination” to eternal objects and the primordial nature of God. He carefully distinguishes between the definite and the determinate, with the latter applying only to actualities. Eternal objects and the primordial nature of God are thus “deficient in actuality.” They are not actual entities (God is only an actual entity with the inclusion of the consequent nature). They are not fully determinate facts. They are real, but as forms of definiteness and as orderings of potential relevance, not as finished concrete actualities.
This is why Whitehead says in Process and Reality that the many eternal objects, abstractly conceived merely in their bare isolated multiplicity, lack any existent character. They require transition to a conception of them as “efficaciously existent by reason of God’s conceptual realization of them” (PR, 249). The divine mind is the primordial created fact, the inverted root of the heaven-tree, “the unconditioned conceptual valuation of the entire multiplicity of eternal objects. By reason of this valuation, eternal objects acquire definite relevance for the concrescence of actual occasions. “Apart from God, eternal objects unrealized in the actual world would be relatively non-existent for the concrescence in question.”
But God’s conceptual realization is nonsense if thought of under the guise of a barren, eternal hypothesis. It is God’s conceptual realization performing an efficacious rôle in multiple unifications of the universe, which are free creations of actualities arising out of decided situations. Again this discordant multiplicity of actual things, requiring each other and neglecting each other, utilizing and discarding, perishing and yet claiming life as obstinate matter of fact, requires an enlargement of the understanding to the comprehension of another phase in the nature of things. In this later phase, the many actualities are one actuality, and the one actuality is many actualities. Each actuality has its present life and its immediate passage into novelty; but its passage is not its death. This final phase of passage in God’s [consequent] nature is ever enlarging itself. In it the complete adjustment of the immediacy of joy and suffering reaches the final end of creation. This end is existence in the perfect unity of adjustment as means, and in the perfect multiplicity of the attainment of individual types of self-existence. The function of being a means is not disjoined from the function of being an end. The sense of worth beyond itself is immediately enjoyed as an overpowering element in the individual self-attainment. It is in this way that the immediacy of sorrow and pain is transformed into an element of triumph. This is the notion of redemption through suffering which haunts the world.” (PR, 349-350).
Whitehead’s God is not a supernatural intruder interrupting an otherwise self-sufficient world of processes. God names the actualizability of ordered possibility, the infinite envisagement whereby pure potentials become relevant lures for concrete becoming. This is also why Whitehead insists that everything must be somewhere, and that the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere as well. That “somewhere” is “the non-temporal actual entity,” that is, the primordial nature of God. Otherwise relevant novelty would have to float into the actual world out of nothing. If one admits as yet unrealized potentiality as really relevant to actual becoming (which to my mind is what is meant by the unprestatability of evolution), then one must ground the source of that relevance ontologically and not merely verbally. Whitehead’s answer is not ad hoc. It follows from his ontological principle: no actuality, no agency; no actual entity, no reason.
If we try to delete eternal objects and make do only with actual occasions and their physical prehensions of one another, Whitehead’s scheme no longer makes any sense, so best to chuck the whole thing and start fresh. In his scheme, without eternal objects and the primordial nature of God, there can be no relevant novelty, no individuality, no scientific knowledge, and certainly no metaphysics. This is not because Whitehead arbitrarily says so, but because his whole account of concrescence rests on the coherence of its dipolarity. Becoming is qualified both by the settled determinateness of the actual world and by conceptual prehensions of the indeterminateness of eternal objects. Novel process is constituted by the ingression of eternal objects not yet exemplified in the settled facts of the past.
Novelty is not mean mere randomness. Novelty means the emergence of a fresh interpretation that is nonetheless relevant to a concrete situation. For that, there must be more than the settled past. There must also be unrealized but relevant possibilities. Whitehead even says flatly that apart from real potentiality, there can be no nexus of actual entities being superseded by novel actual entities. The alternative is a static monistic universe, lacking unrealized potentialities. Everything is already actualized. Eternal objects are therefore not the enemies of process. They are one of the conditions allowing process to be genuinely creative rather than merely repetitive or chaotic.
An actual occasion is not just a passive bundle of inherited influences, fully reducible to its past relations. Its concrescence involves selection, valuation, exclusion, emphasis. In Whitehead’s mature scheme, the “subjective aim” is the means by which an occasion becomes this occasion and not another. But the subjective aim is not spun out of nothing. It feels the originating divine concrescence’s unity of conceptual feelings, including among their data all eternal objects. The finite occasion thus feels the universe of definite potentials as relevant lures appropriately realizable under its unique conditions. The divine valuation or “initial aim” does not predetermine the outcome of a finite concrescence. It offers persuasive alternatives, not coercive ultimatums. It offers the possibility of individual self-determination, not the cancellation of freedom.
In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead’s whole theory of objects is designed to explain how events can be compared, and why nature is not an accidental aggregate but an ordered system, a cosmos. Rather than being arbitrarily imposed from outside, the so-called laws of nature must be understood as the outcome of the characters of the entities which are found in nature. They are thus emergent habits, a function of the reciprocal relation between entitative processes and the regularities they canalize and are canalized by in turn. Whitehead’s point in insisting on an ontology of both events and objects follows from his sense that scientific intelligibility presupposes repeatable forms of definiteness. Without something like eternal objects, something that recurs amidst occurrences, law-like regularity would be impossible. Something might still be happening, but its order would no longer be thinkable, much less knowable.
And certainly there can be no metaphysics without some account of potentiality irreducible to past and present actuality. Process and Reality is explicit that there are no “self-sustained facts, floating in nonentity.” Every proposition about a fact presupposes a wider systematic universe that gives the fact its determinate status. Particular actualities cannot be understood in abstraction from the universal context out of which they arise.
So far as I can tell, those who imagine they might make do with only determinate actualities and no definite potentials only end up sneaking the latter in under some other label. They may speak of structures, affordances, dispositions, constraints, attractors, probabilities, virtualities, or morphospaces. Fine. In many specialized disciplines those terms may even be preferable. But such terms always seem to me to be doing some version of the metaphysical work Whitehead assigns to eternal objects. Eliminating eternal objects is like trying to break a magnet in half to remove the negative pole. You just end up with a smaller magnet.
That is why the appeal to the fallacy of misplaced concreteness cuts both ways. Whitehead’s point is not that we should speak only of actual occasions of experience and banish all abstract categories. His point is that we must never mistake abstractions for the full concreteness of actual life, or imagine that concrete experience might be explained solely by reference to abstract universals.
“The explanatory purpose of philosophy is often misunderstood. Its business is to explain the emergence of the more abstract things from the more concrete things. It is a complete mistake to ask how concrete particular fact can be built up out of universals. The answer is, ‘In no way.’ The true philosophic question is, How can concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its own nature?” (PR, 20).
Concrete fact requires both passage and pattern, both actualization and possibilization, both inheritance from the past and lure toward the not-yet. To reduce the real to determinate occasions alone is every bit as abstract as reducing it to inert substances.
Footnotes2Plato 
What do you think?