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Whitehead'S Philosophy: Actual Entities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Sydney E. Hooper
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Extract

I have tried to expound Whitehead's doctrine of Creativity and of actual entities. Nothing remains but to give a brief summary of what has been said in the foregoing notes.

Creativity is the ultimate activity and principle of novelty in the Universe.

The world is said to consist of “actual entities,” not substances. An actual entity is also called an “actual occasion.” It is essentially a genetic process, having two sides, (I) the process of “becoming,” and (2) the outcome of the process named the “satisfaction.” The satisfaction is the fully determined achievement abstracted from the process. On attaining satisfaction the actual entity viewed as a self-creating subject loses its “final” causation, and as a subject perishes, but the “satisfaction” remains as a potential constituent for the emergence of a new actual entity. This is its “efficient” causation. The potentiality of the satisfaction for a new creation is called its “objective immortality”: in this capacity it functions as an “object” for the self-creation of another actual entity.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 16 , Issue 63 , July 1941 , pp. 285 - 305
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1941

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References

page 285 note 1 Descartes, Meditations IIIGoogle Scholar.

page 285 note 2 Ibid.

page 291 note 1 Lecture.

page 296 note 1 Whitehead explains the ideas of cause and effect in this way. “A simple physical feeling entertained in one subject is a feeling for which the initial datum is another single actual entity. … A simple physical feeling is an act of causation. The actual entity, which is the initial datum, is the ‘cause,’ the simple physical feeling is the ‘effect,’ and the subject entertaining the simple physical feeling is the actual entity ‘conditioned’ by the effect. To avoid excessive detail we can without error call the conditioned actual entity the ‘effect.’”

Note: Since the simple physical feeling is the feeling of the actual entity which is the “cause,” and because a cause's feeling cannot, as a feeling, be abstracted from its own subject, the subject of the cause (a) enters into the new effect (b). That is to say the feeling from the cause (a) acquires the subjectivity of the new effect (b) without loss of its own original subjectivity in the cause. The passage of the cause into the effect is the cumulative character of time.

page 302 note 1 Science of the Modern World, p. 102Google Scholar.