“…the forms are essentially referent beyond themselves. It is mere phantasy to impute to them any ‘absolute reality,’ which is devoid of implications beyond itself. The realm of forms is the realm of potentiality, and the very notion of potentiality has an external meaning. It refers to life and motion. It refers to hope, fear, and intention. Phrasing this statement more generally,–it refers to appetition. It refers to the development of actuality, which realizes form and is yet more than form. It refers to past, present, and future.” – Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought

“Objects enter into experience by recognition and without recognition experience would divulge no objects. Objects convey the permanences recognized in events, and are recognized as self-identical amid different circumstances; that is to say, the same object is recognized as related to diverse events. Thus the self-identical object maintains itself amid the flux of events: it is there and then, and it is here and now; and the ‘it’ which has its being there and here, then and now, is without equivocation the same subject for thought in the various judgments which are made upon it” (ANW PNK 62).

"Practical men, he tells us in HL2 (66), are interested in everyday “enduring” objects like trees, chairs, and mountains; while for the mathematician, the artist, and the philosopher, it is “eternal” objects that stand firm in the flux to capture attention.7 He aims to justify the abstractions populating his metaphysics in three ways (SMW 158): (i) experientially by way of a descriptive account of the actual occasions composing our immediate awareness of ourselves and the natural world; (ii) systematically by bringing many types of such occasions into categoreal harmony; and 3 (iii) onto-epistemically such that the account of what there is to be known reveals also how we can know it (i.e., knowledge in Whitehead’s scheme comes to be understood as an adjunct within things known, rather than as a view from nowhere).8 In his chapter on “Abstraction,” Whitehead is seeking to unveil the metaphysical conditions of finite knowledge. “In any occasion of cognition, that which is known is an actual occasion of experience, as diversified by reference to a realm of entities which transcend that immediate occasion” (SMW 158). What must the metaphysical situation be such that minds like ours, awash in a world of becoming, can nonetheless reflect upon delimited truths and determinate facts? Whitehead marks the “recurrences” exemplified by the periodicities of Nature as essential for such knowledge and constructs his category of eternal objects to account for them (SMW 31). While the process philosopher Nicholas Rescher argues that occurrences “are inherently universal and repeatable,”9 Whitehead insists that each actual creature, though internally related to all occasions in its causal past, is nonetheless unique and once-occurrent, a novel addition to creation never to be repeated in its full concreteness. What recurs is not actual occasions, but eternal objects. Whitehead will later come to refer to the enduring objects of the everyday world (trees, chairs, mountains, etc.) as “historical routes” or “societies” of occasions that repeatedly ingress the definite characteristics of some constellation of eternal objects, though strictly speaking even such constellations in their complex details are also new in each moment, as “nothing ever really recurs in exact detail” (SMW 5). Trees continually exchange carbon and oxygen with the surrounding atmosphere; the springs in armchairs gradually lose their bounce, and their fabric fades in the sunlight; mountains are lifted by tectonic plates or weathered by rain and wind. “‘Change’ is the description of the adventures of eternal objects in the evolving universe of actual things” (PR 59), but relative to human lifespans enough sameness is retained amidst these slow changes to allow the forms of enduring societies to be recognized amidst the flux.

Knowledge entails the abstraction of recurrent aspects of the world from what is otherwise an ongoing creative advance. Whitehead’s eternal objects come in two types: (i) a subjective species, e.g., colors, sounds, and emotions that can be experienced in an individual occasion (and can sometimes also function relationally, as when inherited in some socially organized route of occasions), and (ii) an objective species, e.g., mathematical patterns, which can only function relationally as a medium linking various occasions together in a spatiotemporal nexus (PR 291). Whitehead refers to these “pure potentials for the specific determination of fact” (PR 22) as “eternal objects” in order to distinguish them from the classical philosophical conception of universals. Like universals, eternal objects are abstract, meaning they can be conceived independently of their ingression into any particular concrete occasion of experience. “Greenness” or “brightness” as subjective eternal objects may be realized together in an event, say, the sun-illumined face of a moss-covered mountain. But they could also ingress separately in other situations, like as the color of a snake or the glimmer of Sirius, respectively. They can occur anywhere at any time. That said, Whitehead wants to avoid further association with the philosophical baggage of universals, especially Aristotle’s system of logical classification in terms of genera and species, which while useful for the analysis of actual fact distorts the 4 analysis of abstract possibility that he seeks to undertake. Rather than a classificatory logic, Whitehead analyzes the relations among eternal objects and between such objects and actualities in a mathematical way akin to the “absolutely abstract patterns…of algebraic forms of variables,” as Ronny Desmet puts it. 10

In the context of his mature metaphysical scheme, Whitehead’s account of the conditions of finite knowledge presupposes his account of the pre-epistemic or unconscious cosmological functioning of eternal objects. How do enduring physical entities propagate their form from occasion to occasion through the medium of spacetime? By way of the “efficacy of generalities,” as George Allan puts it: “the constitutive functioning of moments as a kind, of which the present emerging moment is an instance.”11 In Whitehead’s terms, “Wherever you get anything general you’ve got something that lies beyond [any] particular occasion” (HL1 57). That is, eternal objects are already incarnate in the realized definiteness of the enduring entities of the physical world before those entities come to be analyzed within the rare conscious occasions associated with a human mind. A minimal mental pole is operative even at the lowest grade of actuality, e.g., in the electromagnetic occasions studied by physics, but its capacity for conceptual prehension is limited to germinal lures of feeling providing an immediacy of enjoyment and purpose (PR 184). Such a minimal mental pole allows contraries to be brought into contrast with the data inherited by the physical pole, but with a regularity of alternation constituting the stability of pattern known to physicists as vibration (PR 187-188). Physical occasions are thus causally related among themselves via the blind perceptivity of physical purposes. Knowledge, on the other hand, implies more than just the repetitive entertainment of feelings of contrast. Knowledge requires judgment of correct and incorrect. Correct judgments indicate eternal objects already ingressed into some portion of the antecedent physical world (i.e., they indicate “real potentials”): what had ingressed there is now prehended here, with the addition of self-critical cognitive apprehension. Scientists, in hypothesizing mathematical abstractions that unveil some aspect of pattern in the passage of Nature, entertain real potentials never before irradiated by consciousness. Incorrect judgments, on the other hand, reveal our capacity not only for error but for imaginative freedom. It frequently occurs that we entertain delusive perceptions, say, mistaking a green stick for a snake, or the twinkling of Sirius for an aircraft. In some cases, as in art or literature, we intentionally imagine the world otherwise. Incorrect judgments involve the conceptual prehension of alternative possibilities that are not but may be (i.e., “pure potentials”). As every artist knows and laments, our capacity to realize a creative vision is tragically limited by time and circumstance; even so, in the throes of creation the painter, the poet, and the actor can partake in and exemplify possibilities not previously realized in the physical world. While most logicians leave it at that, Whitehead reminds us that very often false propositions nonetheless aid us in interpreting the given facts by availing us of alternatives. Indeed, unless construed with reference to an indefinite background which we experience but cannot consciously analyze, strictly speaking every proposition is erroneous. 12 Our knowledge is always partial, as all finite truth is haloed by a penumbra of unbounded possibility. Whitehead’s organic realism is radically empirical, but unlike classical empiricists content to explain away universals as nothing more than names assigned to faded sense impressions, Whitehead affirms the necessary dipolarity of reality, such that the proper understanding of actuality requires that reference also be made to ideality, that is, to a realm of alternative suggestions or unrealized potentials. Thus, the givenness of actualities cannot be made sense of without conceptually 5 tracing their relation to a constellation of adjacent possibilities; and, at the same time, unrealized possibilities cannot be made sense of unless contrasted with definite matters of fact.13 “Each event can only be described as what it is among what it might be as well as what it is among community of all other things that are” (HL2 14).

Despite the ontological inseparability of ideality and actuality, Whitehead nonetheless ventures an analysis of the realm of possibility in abstraction from actualities. He tells us that eternal objects like actual occasions have both an individual and a relational essence. The relational essence of an eternal object is its determinate internal relation to every other object in the infinite realm of possibility, and to actuality generally. Each eternal object is systematically and necessarily constituted by its relations to every other eternal object, such that ingressing one ingresses all, though with gradation of relevance. The internal relations of eternal objects are said to take the form of an indefinite number of “abstractive hierarchies,” with simple objects at their base, complex objects at their vertex, and objects of proximate complexity in-between (SMW 168-9). An eternal object in its relational essence is said to remain “isolated” (SMW 165) from actuality, only incarnating its individual essence because of an actual occasion’s decision to fuse it together with some finite subset of other possibilities in its novel aesthetic synthesis, with irrelevant possibilities thrust into the systematic substratum. In reflecting on the nature of abstractive hierarchies, Whitehead says we can conceive of a route of progress in any “assigned mode of abstraction” (SMW 168), which I take to mean that it is up to the one doing the analysis to define which progression of eternal objects they are interested in analyzing. Any such assignment implies the activity of conceptual prehension and assumes a spatiotemporal perspective on the realm of possibility. This stands in contrast to what Whitehead says regarding the relations among eternal objects themselves, which are entirely “unselective and systematically complete” (SMW 164). I take him to mean that the sort of assignment of mode made by defining where a finite hierarchy begins and ends (i.e., its base and vertex) is in some sense arbitrarily imposed by the interests motivating the analysis. We may ask at this point whether or to what extent it is feasible to examine the internal relations among possibilities in themselves. Is there not a problem analogous to the quantum measurement problem, whereby our very attempt to peek into hierarchies of pure possibility necessarily contaminates what it was we were attempting to analyze by dragging a finite selection of eternal objects from the indefinite multiplicity of their isolation into the horizon of our conscious experience? In other words, our conceptual prehension of an individual eternal object tugs various associated hierarchies of adjacent objects with it into quasi-actuality, a mental act Whitehead likens to Platonic reminiscence (PR 242). Whitehead indicates that the inevitable “abruptness” (SMW 171) of our mental capacities means we can only trace these relations so far, an issue discussed further below in connection with God’s primordial envisagement''.

MS

https://footnotes2plato.com/2022/08/27/standing-firm-in-the-flux-on-whiteheads-eternal-objects-draft-article/