The Pulse and the Pattern

On Whitehead, actual occasions, and the metaphysics of becoming

Alfred North Whitehead spent the first half of his life as one of the great mathematicians of the modern era, coauthoring with Bertrand Russell the Principia Mathematica, a three-volume attempt to derive all of mathematics from logic. He spent the second half doing something almost no mathematician of his stature had done. He turned to metaphysics. Not as a hobby or a softening in old age, but because he had become convinced that the whole Western philosophical tradition rested on a mistake, and that the mistake made it impossible to think clearly about reality.

He called the mistake the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the habit of taking the abstractions we use to talk about the world and treating them as the world itself. We notice patterns of stability in our experience, a stone or a person or a chair, and we infer behind those patterns the existence of things, enduring substances that persist through time with properties attached. The stone is hard. The person is anxious. The grammar is so deeply embedded in speech that it feels like a description of reality rather than a convention of language. But Whitehead, looking at what physics had begun to reveal in the early twentieth century, concluded that the grammar was lying. There were no enduring things under the patterns. There were only the patterns, made of something else.

What he proposed instead is strange, because it inverts the common-sense order, and beautiful, because once you sit with it the world reorganizes around it. Reality is not composed of things that occasionally undergo events. It is composed of events that occasionally compose themselves into something that looks, from far enough away, like a thing. He called these events actual occasions. They are the atoms of his universe, but not pellets of stuff. They are drops of becoming.

What an occasion is

An actual occasion is a momentary act of synthesis. It arises, gathers the entire universe of past occasions into itself, makes something new of that gathering, and perishes. The whole life of an occasion is a pulse: a coming-into-being, a flash of subjective immediacy, a passing-on. Whitehead called the gathering concrescence, the growing-together, and the act of grasping past occasions prehension, a word he invented because perception was too tied to consciousness, and what he was describing happens at every level of reality, from a flickering electron to a thought.

The picture, once it lands, is vertiginous. There are no enduring substances anywhere. The stone on the windowsill is a society of occasions, Whitehead's term, a vast ordered route of momentary events, each inheriting the character of its predecessors and reproducing it with such fidelity that from our scale it looks like permanence. The stone is not standing still. It is happening, over and over, in a pattern so faithful to itself that the happening looks like stillness. The same is true of the chair. The same, and this is the part the mind resists, is true of you.

You, on the Whiteheadian picture

What we call a self is not a substance that persists through time. It is a society of occasions of experience, each arising, gathering its predecessors, making something of them, and perishing into the past. The self that woke up this morning is not, in any strict metaphysical sense, the self reading this sentence. It is the latest in a long route of occasions, each inheriting from the last and adding its own small contribution of novelty. There is no underlying me sitting beneath the experiences, having them. The experiences are the me. The pulse is the person.

On its face this is exactly the news the stability-seeking part of us does not want. We are looking for a self we can rest in, a finished version, the real us the changes have slowly been revealing. Whitehead is telling us, with mathematical precision, that there is no such thing. The self we are looking for would have to be a substance, and there are no substances. The thing we keep trying to find is the wrong category of thing.

And yet, against the odds, Whitehead becomes a consolation, because he does not leave us in pure dissolution. He sees something the modern celebration of flux does not always see. Occasions, once they perish, are not gone. They become objectively immortal. The completed occasion, having achieved its determinate character, passes into the past as something fixed and unchangeable, and then becomes available, as a permanent fact, for every occasion that follows to prehend. The past is the only thing in Whitehead's universe that does not change. It is the storehouse of completed becomings, and every present moment draws from it.

So there is permanence in the picture. Just not the permanence we were asking for. We wanted a permanent self, a stable thing in the present. What Whitehead offers is the permanence of what has been done. The conversation you had this morning is now permanent. The decision you made last year is now permanent. The kindness, the mistake, the small attention you paid to the person across the table are now, in the most literal sense Whitehead can manage, facts of the universe, available forever to every future occasion as part of the inheritance it must reckon with.

This is a different consolation than the one we came in looking for, but it is real. The version of us that arrived at this moment is not durable. The occasions through which we have become are. We have not been building a self. We have been depositing occasions into the permanent record of what has happened, and the record is the only thing that lasts.

The principle of process

Whitehead crystallized the whole metaphysics in a sentence worth slowing down on: How an actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is, so that the two descriptions of an actual entity are not independent. Its 'being' is constituted by its 'becoming.' This is the 'principle of process.'

Read it twice. He is saying, and the rest of Process and Reality elaborates this single move, that the question what is a thing and the question how does it come to be are the same question. To describe a thing fully is to describe its becoming, because there is nothing else to a thing besides the manner of its becoming. The substance we keep reaching for, the being underneath the becoming, does not exist. The becoming is the being.

This is the answer the book has been circling from the beginning, now stated in the vocabulary of one of the most rigorous metaphysical systems ever attempted. We are not creatures who would be at rest if only we could stop changing. We are creatures whose nature is the changing. The stability we long for is not a feature reality could provide if it tried harder. It is a category we keep applying to a universe that does not contain it at the level we are looking. Whitehead is not telling us to settle for becoming because being is unavailable. He is telling us that becoming is the deeper category, the one being itself is made of.

The friend whose face is changing

Consider what this implies for the simplest acts of love. To love a person is not to love a substance, a fixed thing called her or him that you can possess or hold on to. There is no such thing to love. To love a person is to love a route of occasions, a long, intricate, irreducibly novel society of momentary becomings. The face across the table is not the face that was there a year ago, and not because the face has changed, as if there were a face that changed, but because the face is, in Whitehead's terms, a fresh occasion every time you see it.

This is closer to how love feels when we let ourselves notice. The person we love is not standing still while we love them. They are happening. We are not building a relationship with an object. We are accompanying, in real time, a process, and the relationship is itself a process, our own route of occasions weaving alongside theirs, each pulse of attention a new act of prehension, each shared moment a new occasion passing into the permanent record.

Whitehead's universe is one in which nothing repeats and nothing returns, but in which everything that has ever happened is still, in a sense that matters, there. Every loving glance, every act of care, every minor cruelty, every meal eaten in company has passed and is still real. The past is the dignity of the present. The present is the becoming of the future. There is no stillness anywhere. There is only the pulse, and the pattern it leaves behind, which is the only permanence the universe offers, and which turns out, when we stop demanding the wrong kind, to be enough.