Whitehead notes: Process and Reality, unfinished

These are just quotes not even in note form yet. They have been sitting in my drafts pile for a while and I will not have time to complete the post for ages so I thought I just post them. I have added a ‘Whitehead’ blog category.

p11 “[I]deas which these men introduced into philosophic tradition must be construed with limitations, adaptatins, and inversions, either unknown to them. or even explicitly repudiated by them.”

p18 “‘Actual entities’ — also termed ‘actual occasions’ — are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real.”

P19 “Each actual entity is analysably in an indefinite number of ways. In somemode of analysis the component elements are more abstract than in other modes of analysis. The analysis of an actual entity into ‘prehensions’ is that mode of analysis which exhibits the most concrete elements in the nature of actual entities. This mode of analysis will be called the ‘division’ of the actual entity in question. Each actual entity is ‘divisible’ in an indefinite number of ways, and each way of division’ yields its definite quota of prehensions. A prehension reproduces in itself the general characteristics of an actual entity : it is referent to an external world, and in this sense will be said to have a ‘vector character’; it involves emotion, and purpose, and validation, and causation. In fact, any characteristic of an actual entity is reproduced in a prehension.”

p32 “Appetition is at once the conceptual valuation of an immediate physical feeling combined with the urge towards realization of the datum conceptually prehended. For example, ‘thirst’ is an immediate physical feeling integrated with the conceptual prehension of its quenching.”

P45 “this is the doctrine of the emergent unity of the superject. An actual entity is to be conceived both as a subject presiding voer its own immediacy of becoming, and a superject which is the atomic creature exercising its function of objective immortality. It has becom a ‘being’; and it belongs to the nature of every ‘being’ that it is a potential for every ‘becoming.’ […]
“Thus the process of becoming is dipolar, (i) by reason of its qualification by the determinateness of the actual world, and (ii) by its conceptual prehensions of the indeterminateness of eternal objects [pure events]. The process is constituted by the influx of eternal objects into novel determinateness of feeling which absorbs the actual world into a novel actuality.”

p47 “The Leibnizian theory of the ‘best of possible worlds’ is an audacious fudge produced in order to save the face of a Creator constructed by contemporary, and antecedent, theologians.”

p58 “In this important passage, Locke enunciates the main doctrines of the philosophy of organism, namely: the principle of relativity; the relational character of eternal objects, whereby they constitute the forms of objectifications of actual entities for each other; the composite character of an actual entity (i.e. a substance); the notion of power as making a principle ingredient in that of actual entity (substance). In this latter notion, Locke adumbrates both the ontological principle, and also the principle that the ‘power’ of one actual entity on the other is simply how the former is objectified in the constitution of the other. Thus the problem of perception and the problem of power are one and the same, at least so far as perception is reduced to mere prefension of actual entities. Perception, in the sense of consciousness of such prehension, requires the additional factor of the conceptual prehension of eternal objects, and a process of integration of the two factors.”