Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms
In this disputation I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial exposition; Jacob replied with critical questions; I responded; then Adam entered with his own objections and developments; and we ended with a more free-form exchange.
Reforming Platonism in the Context of the Evolution of Consciousness
I began by situating the realism/nominalism debate in an evolution of consciousness, drawing on Rudolf Steiner. I did not want the conversation to be a purely scholastic wrangle about universals; I wanted to frame nominalism and realism as historically and developmentally appropriate stages in how human beings relate to ideas.
In the ancient Greek origins of Western philosophy (ie, the physiologoi, and still residually in Plato and Aristotle), I suggested that ideas were experienced almost as perceived in the world, as though the intelligible structure of the cosmos shone through phenomena. With Christianity and the long interiorization of thought, ideas came to be experienced more as inner constructs. The medieval nominalists arise in part to protect divine omnipotence (God cannot be constrained by eternal structures), but on Steiner’s reading they also express the growing autonomy of the human “I”: ideas are now felt as something we make rather than something we receive. This trend intensifies in Kant, where categories are explicitly the mind’s contributions to a phenomenal world, while the “things in themselves” recede beyond our reach.
From this, I argued that nominalism has been developmentally necessary—it fostered modern science and the modern sense of self—but has become spiritually and conceptually constraining. We need a post-nominalist realism about form that does not regress to pre-modern essentialism. That is where I positioned Whitehead’s eternal objects.
I formulated my core thesis along these lines:
I am defending a reformed process-relational Platonism that entails the reality of an eternally evolving field of universal forms irreducible to but not ontologically independent of the historical accumulation of particular facts.
Then I sketched Whitehead’s account, wherein eternal objects provide a metaphysical condition for recognition of invariants and thus for scientific knowledge. Drawing on Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), I emphasized Whitehead’s claim that “objects enter into experience by recognition.” Science presupposes that “the same object is recognized as related to diverse events.” This recurrence is what makes invariant laws, measurements, and rational prediction possible. Eternal objects are not the same as laws of physics; laws and physical structures are historically emergent. Eternal objects are more basic: they express a structure of possibility that gives order to what has not yet been actualized.
Whitehead’s metaphysics constitutes an inversion of classical Platonism. Unlike the caricatured “two-world” Platonism (where Ideas are more real than appearances), Whitehead grants ontological priority to actual occasions of experience. Forms are real, but “deficient in actuality.” Forms do not act as efficient causes; they do not push the world around and are not stamped onto passive matter. Agency belongs to actual occasions and societies (enduring organisms, human minds, etc.), which select and ingress possibilities. So rather than the world being a pale copy of a higher realm, we have a world of concrete experiential events that draw from a field of potential form. It is a kind of inverted or reformed Platonism.
I also introduced my dialogue with Michael Levin: Levin’s “platonic morphospace” in developmental biology seems to require a genuine, non-reducible field of form guiding morphogenesis, especially via bioelectric patterning that can’t be reduced to genes alone. Levin tends to give morphospace itself the agency, turning organisms into puppets of the form-field. I’ve been pushing back with Whitehead: forms are real but not agents; organisms and occasions are the agents. I want to affirm Levin’s reintroduction of formal and final causality into biology while adjusting the metaphysics so we do not slip back into an over-strong, two-world Platonism.
Patterns Are Not Puppeteers: The Return and Reformation of Platonic Form in Biology
I’ve discussed the return of Platonism in biology before. The following recounts some of what I discussed with Bonnitta Roy as a visitor at the Divinity School (https://www.endemic.org/the-divinity-school/home) earlier today.
Finally, I gestured toward Whitehead’s God: God gives a primordial valuation and ordering of eternal objects—a vector toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—but does not determine what is actualized. God’s consequent nature receives and integrates all finite decisions, leading to an “evolving eternity”: actual facts “cast the shadow of truth back upon the eternal.”
Jacob’s response: suspicion of forms and “eternal objects”
Jacob began by articulating some strong reservations about my view, especially around the notion of eternal objects.
From my perspective, his main points were:
Theological unease and God-of-the-gaps worry
He worried that eternal objects are more a theological than a philosophical posit. Whitehead, in his view, might be “too much of a theologian.”
He raised the classic concern: are eternal objects and God filling explanatory gaps that could be handled by a more modest, empiricist account of abstraction?
Analogy with the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
Jacob wondered if eternal objects are in danger of reifying abstractions—exactly what Whitehead warns us against.
He was unconvinced that invoking eternal objects avoids this fallacy rather than committing a more subtle version of it.
Transcendence, normativity, and the danger of stifling novelty
He associated Platonic form-talk with appeals to transcendence that smuggle in normative standards in ways that can stifle experiment and novelty (socially, ethically, politically).
He acknowledged that Whitehead often seems to say something Platonist and then something apparently opposed in the same breath, which made it hard for him to see what exactly is being claimed.
Two key questions: “eternal” and “objects”
Why “eternal”? If the field of possibility is evolving, why use a term that classically implies immutability? Why not speak of “transient abstract structures” on a much larger timescale?
Why “objects”? Given that eternal objects have no independent efficacy and reveal nothing without the world-process, in what sense are they “objects” at all?
Why not just mind-based abstraction?
Jacob asked why we need anything beyond the idea that abstraction is an emergent capacity of finite minds.
For him, it is not clear why that is insufficient: we can imagine forms as patterns abstracted from experience without positing a separate category of “eternal objects.”
Overall, Jacob pressed me to explain:
what problem eternal objects solve that a lean account of abstraction does not,
and why their “eternal” and “object-like” status is warranted.
My response to Jacob: cosmologizing the transcendental
In responding to Jacob, I tried to clarify:
Philosophical, not devotional, role of God
I stressed that Whitehead invokes God as a metaphysical requirement to account for the transition from indefinite possibility to definite actuality, analogous (but not identical) to Aristotle’s metaphysical need for an unmoved mover.
Historically, science itself, I argued, presupposes some faith in the commensurability of mind and nature. Whitehead believes this calls for metaphysical articulation, not just tacit acceptance.
Eternal objects and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness
Eternal objects are explicitly not concrete; they are pure potentialities. The fallacy, for Whitehead, is treating abstractions as if they were concrete. He is not denying the reality of abstraction.
As Isabelle Stengers emphasizes, for Whitehead abstraction is part of nature—not an invention of language. Sense organs, nervous systems, all sorts of organisms already “abstract” by filtering and selecting relevant aspects of their environment.
Why “eternal” and “object”?
Eternal objects are “eternal” because they are not in space-time. Space-time, for Whitehead, is itself an abstraction—a network of metrical relations among occasions of experience. To treat space-time as concrete is itself a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.
“Object,” in Whitehead’s technical vocabulary, simply means a potential that can be prehended, what can be taken as a potential ingredient in an occasion’s experience. “Actual subjects” (occasions) prehend “objects” (potentials). So “object” here names their role in experience, not a thing-like substance.
Radical empiricism and the insufficiency of pure nominalism
I appealed to the Peirce–James–Whitehead lineage: James’s nominalist pragmatism is, in Peirce and Whitehead’s view, not mathematically literate enough to support the precision and invariance required for science.
From that perspective, a robust realism about form is a condition for making sense of scientific practice itself. Eternal objects are Whitehead’s way of giving that realism a processual, non-substantialist formulation.
In short, I tried to show that eternal objects are not ad hoc metaphysical luxuries but an attempt to “cosmologize the transcendental”: to give a cosmological account of the conditions of possibility for recurrence, measurement, and rational discourse itself.
Segall
https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/contemporary-natural-philosophy-needs?utm_source=youtube
