#eternal objects

Darren and I had an intense geek out session exploring some of Whitehead’s categoreal scheme. Key points include: The complex nature of eternal objects in Whitehead’s philosophy and the lack of consensus on the subject among scholars. The interaction between eternal objects and actual occasions, and how this relates to the primordial and consequent natures of God. The idea that the Eternal is…

It is well to ask why Whitehead invented the term “eternal object” instead of sticking with the more familiar language of potentials and forms. First, “objects” establishes their status as depending on subjects. Objects exist only for subjects. They can be felt; they cannot feel. In themselves they cannot act. They are, indeed, passive.

We might suppose that all this would be heard in a word like “form,” but the history of philosophy warns us that this is not so. The Greeks thought extensively about form and matter. They thought everything actual could be understood as formed matter. But in their understanding, “matter” was passive. Acting was a function of form rather than matter. Plato, therefore, attributed an extremely important role to forms.

Further, most of the discussion of forms was of the forms of actual things and norms. Forms were used for classifying, and there was a sense that there were objectively real types of things, just as there were real norms identified by value-laden words. Whitehead wanted a label that would not carry any of these connotations. Qua objects, no one form is preferable to any other form. No one classificatory system is better than another. There are hierarchies of forms in terms of complexity, but not in terms of value.

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… It is true that every pattern that is exemplified in every symphony that has ever been written or performed has always existed as an eternal object. Indeed, since no symphony is ever exactly the same in two performances, we must say that there is a slightly different pattern ingredient in every performance, and since no two listeners will hear it in exactly the same way, there is a slightly different pattern for every hearer and on each occasion of hearing. But these are only patterns. As patterns they have no different status from trillions of other patterns until they are selected by Mozart and the orchestras that actualize the music.

In any case, as eternal objects they are not patterns of sound. The sound does not exist until it is heard. Even God cannot hear it until God can share the hearing with creatures. Similarly, God had no visual experience until there were creaturely eyes.

The choice of the term “eternal” may have been unfortunate. For many people it has a religious, or at least an honorific, connotation. Under the influence of Plato, it was long thought that things that are eternal are somehow superior to things that are temporal. But for Whitehead all value is located in actuality and all actuality is temporal or, in God’s case, derivative from what is temporal.

For Whitehead “eternal” means nothing more than nontemporal. That is another way of saying that “eternal” objects have no actuality at all in themselves. They do not come into being and they do not pass away. They are related to every temporal moment in the same way, so far as their own nature is concerned.

Whitehead’s use of the word “eternal” might seem to be a strange move, in the context of a philosophy grounded in events, becomings, and continual change and novelty. And indeed, as if acknowledging this, he remarks that, “if the term ‘eternal objects’ is disliked, the term ‘potentials’ would be suitable” instead (1929/1978, 149). But if Whitehead prefers to retain the appellation “eternal objects,” this is precisely because he seeks—like Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze—to reject the Platonic separation between eternity and time, the binary opposition that sets a higher world of permanence and perfection (“a static, spiritual heaven”) against an imperfect lower world of flux (209). The two instead must continually interpenetrate. For “permanence can be snatched only out of flux; and the passing moment can find its adequate intensity only by its submission to permanence. Those who would disjoin the two elements can find no interpretation of patent facts” (338). Actual entities continually perish; but the relations between them, or the patterns that they make, tend to recur, or endure. Thus “it is not ‘substance’ which is permanent, but ‘form.’” And even forms do not subsist absolutely, but continually “suffer changing relations” (29). In asserting this, Whitehead converts Plato from idealism to empiricism, just as he similarly converts Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant.

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… we feel all actual occasions in our actual world, but only a selection of the possibilities is felt… It does not follow that the unfelt possibilities do not exist, or exist only in a Platonic realm of forms, as the caricature of Whitehead maintains. Such views trade in the obligation to account for the reality of determinate modes of order in our cosmic epoch for a crypto-determinism in which possibility has no role in limiting real potentiality. To dump the eternal objects is the same as reductionism, and many of the so-called naturalists are committed to the materialism Whitehead criticized in Science and the Modern World. That was not their intent, but eternal objects are indispensable to Whitehead’s cosmology, and they are not “Platonic forms” or “universals,” if by that one means that they are non-natural.

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Thus the endeavour to understand eternal objects in complete abstraction from the actual world results in reducing them to mere undifferentiated nonentities. This is an exemplification of the categoreal principle, that the general metaphysical character of being an entity is 'to be a determinant in the becoming of actualities.' Accordingly the differentiated relevance of eternal objects to each instance of the creative process requires their conceptual realization in the primordial nature of God. He does not create eternal objects; for his nature requires them in the same degree that they require him. This is an exemplification of the coherence of the categoreal types of existence. The general relationships of eternal objects to each other, relationships of diversity and of pattern, are their relationships in God's conceptual realization. Apart from this realization, there is mere isolation indistinguishable from nonentity.