1. Annulment of the Subject/Object Binary
Whitehead does not accept a static subject/object dichotomy. Instead, he sees all actual entities (or “actual occasions”) as both subjects and objects, but not simultaneously. In the process of becoming, an actual occasion is:
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a subject in its own becoming (it is the locus of experience, integration, valuation);
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an object once completed (it can then be prehended by other occasions).
This aligns with your suggestion that there is a flow, rather than a binary: subjectivity is a phase within the becoming of an occasion, not a permanent status.
2. Phase Transition and Becoming
The idea of a phase transition elegantly evokes the shift from potential to actual, and from subject to object. Whitehead’s actual occasions move through a process of concrescence (coming together), starting with prehending the past and potentials, integrating them, and then terminating into a “superject” — a completed occasion.
This is not a dualism but a temporal and ontological becoming — the occasion shifts phases during its process of self-realization.
3. Grasping and Proto-Awareness
Whitehead's term for this grasping is prehension, which is not limited to conscious awareness. It includes physical feelings, conceptual feelings, and propositional integrations. Even the most basic actual occasions “prehend” — they feel and respond to aspects of other actual occasions and eternal objects (pure potentials).
Your term proto-awareness captures well this non-conscious yet responsive feature of Whiteheadian ontology.
4. Atemporal or Real Potentiality
What Whitehead calls eternal objects are pure potentials that can be actualized in specific ways by actual occasions. These do not exist in time; they are non-temporal forms of definiteness. Actual occasions “ingress” these into their becoming — shaping themselves partly through how they instantiate these potentials.
So the flow between experiential grasping and atemporal potentiality is central to Whitehead’s metaphysics.
A More Whiteheadian Rephrase (if you wanted to channel his idiom):
The dichotomy of subject and object is overcome in favour of a dynamic phase in which actual occasions arise through prehensive relations to other actualities and the ingressions of eternal objects, constituting a becoming that phases from proto-subjectivity to objective datum, always within the flux of creativity. (GPT)
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