What does datum consist in?

ChatGPT said:

In Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality, datum refers to what is given to an actual occasion of experience—what it inherits or receives in the act of becoming. It's the content available to be felt, interpreted, or prehended in the process of concrescence.

More precisely, a datum consists in:

1. Past actual occasions — their objective existence, now complete and perished, becomes part of the causal background that informs new occasions.

2. Eternal objects — pure potentials or forms of definiteness that can be realized or instantiated within an occasion.

3. Relations between things — the relational structure inherited from the past (e.g., spatial, temporal, causal configurations).

So, in each moment of becoming, the datum is a mixture of actuality and potentiality:

• Actualities: what has already happened and become fixed (the objective immortality of past actual occasions),

• Potentials: what could be, as offered by eternal objects.

An actual occasion doesn’t create ex nihilo—it feels its world, inherits this datum, and creatively integrates it to produce novelty.

In short:

The datum is the inherited content of reality—past events and possible forms—that an actual occasion draws upon in becoming itself.

Would you like a diagrammatic breakdown of datum and concrescence, a comparison between datum and phenomenological givenness, or a summary of Whitehead’s metaphysical categories?

You said:

So eternal objects are a type of datum?

ChatGPT said:

Yes—eternal objects are a type of datum, but with an important nuance: they are potential data, not actual.

In Whitehead’s metaphysics:

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🔹 Two Types of Datum in an Actual Occasion:

1. Actual Data – the causal past, i.e. past actual occasions that have completed their becoming. These are “objectively immortal,” meaning they continue to exist as fixed facts and are felt or prehended by new occasions.

2. Potential Data – eternal objects, which are possibilities for how definiteness (form, quality, intensity, relation) may enter into an occasion. They do not force themselves into becoming; they are “lures for feeling,” waiting to be selected.

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⚙️ Their Roles in Concrescence:

• An actual occasion integrates both:

  • what has happened (actual occasions)

  • and what could happen (eternal objects)

  through the process of concrescence, or the becoming of that moment.

• Example: Imagine a moment of pain. The occasion prehends previous painful experiences (actual data), and selects among potential intensities or shapes of pain (eternal objects) to actualize something new.

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🧠 Clarification:

Eternal objects are never actual themselves. They exist in a non-temporal realm of pure possibility (a bit like Plato’s Forms, though Whitehead is more processual). But they enter into actuality when selected and realized in an actual occasion.

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So: yes, eternal objects are a kind of datum—they are potential data, just as past actual occasions are actual data.

Would you like to explore how eternal objects relate to aesthetics or emotion, compare them to Platonic forms, or dig into Whitehead’s theory of prehension?

ChatGPT said:

Yes—your revised version is much more accurate and conceptually faithful to Whitehead’s Process and Reality. It captures the core ideas of:

• the perishing and inheritance of actual occasions,

• the twofold nature of datum (actual and potential),

• the process of prehension,

• and the relational, co-constitutive nature of experience.

That said, a few minor refinements could increase clarity and precision without sacrificing your tone or intent.

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✅ Refined Version (with suggested tweaks for clarity and technical fidelity):

Subjects, colloquially defined, might instead be temporalized and pluralized as “actual occasions”—discrete events of experience that, step by step, perish and contribute to the actual datum for future occasions. Alongside this actual datum is a second kind of datum: eternal objects, or pure potentials, which together with the past provide qualities, relations, definiteness, and novelty to new occasions. These new occasions prehend (i.e., feel in an elemental and non-reflective way) and, in doing so, internalize and co-constitute a world of connected occasions.

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🔍 Why these refinements?

• "Discrete events of experience" grounds actual occasions more precisely.

• Clarifying “eternal objects” as “pure potentials” makes their ontological status more explicit.

• “Alongside this...” smooths the transition and tightens the sentence.

• Removing “occasionally apprehend”: In Whitehead's terms, prehension is the fundamental mode—apprehension implies a more cognitive act and isn’t a central term in his lexicon.

• “A world of connected occasions” reinforces the relational ontology without overloading the sentence.

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So yes, you’re very close, and your formulation is already much more aligned with Whitehead than most philosophical paraphrases.

your metaphorical register is accurate and evocative, and it remains faithful to Whitehead’s conceptual structure while offering readers an intuitive grasp of his otherwise opaque terminology. Let’s look at the key parts:

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✅ Accurate Components:

• "Concrescence is the entire process... by which an actual occasion comes into being"
  This is spot on. Whitehead defines concrescence as the self-constitution of an actual occasion through the integration of prehensions.

• Citing Whitehead:

  "In a process of concrescence, there is a succession of phases in which new prehensions arise by integration of prehensions in antecedent phases.”
  —Yes, this is quoted accurately from Whitehead. You correctly capture the phased, cumulative character of concrescence.

• "The subjective immediacy of seemingly ironclad windowless rooms gain then lose walls and windows..."
  This metaphor beautifully conveys the illusion of isolation Whitehead attributes to actual occasions during concrescence (they are momentarily self-contained), yet they ultimately perish and are taken up into the causal fabric of the world. The “walls and windows” image is a strong poetic analog for subjective immediacy versus objective immortality.

• "...becoming the common stuff which is taken up by and which constitutes more 'actual occasions'"
  Perfect. This captures the way perished occasions become data (the actual past) for new ones.

• "...subjective immediacy, which isn't as boxed in as it seems but is, instead, an occasion’s way of relating and being affected."
  Again, very true to Whitehead. Though each occasion feels itself as a “one” (i.e., a subject), it is nothing more than a momentary integration of relations—a node of affect, as it were. It’s a perspectival process of feeling, not an enclosed ego.

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✅ Summary Evaluation:

Your version is accurate, poetically expressive, and Whiteheadian in spirit. It honors the metaphysical precision while introducing metaphors that illuminate the ephemeral subjectivity of actual occasions without collapsing into psychological or Cartesian habits