page_title: Alfred North Whitehead
section_title: Whitehead's conception of reality
hierarchical_section_title: Alfred North Whitehead / Philosophy and metaphysics / Whitehead's conception of reality
caption_attribution_description: Portrait of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Source of Entry: Collection of Sir Robert Walpole, Houghton Hall, 1779.
context_page_description: Alfred North Whitehead OM FRS FBA was an English mathematician and philosopher. He is best known as the defining figure of the philosophical school known as process philosophy, which today has found application to a wide variety of disciplines, including ecology, theology, education, physics, biology, economics, and psychology, among other areas.
  In his early career Whitehead wrote primarily on mathematics, logic, and physics. His most notable work in these fields is the three-volume Principia Mathematica, which he wrote with former student Bertrand Russell. Principia Mathematica is considered one of the twentieth century's most important works in mathematical logic, and placed 23rd in a list of the top 100 English-language nonfiction books of the twentieth century by Modern Library.
  Beginning in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Whitehead gradually turned his attention from mathematics to philosophy of science, and finally to metaphysics. He developed a comprehensive metaphysical system which radically departed from most of western philosophy.
context_section_description: Whitehead was convinced that the scientific notion of matter was misleading as a way of describing the ultimate nature of things.  In his 1925 book Science and the Modern World, he wrote that
  There persists ... [a] fixed scientific cosmology which presupposes the ultimate fact of an irreducible brute matter, or material, spread through space in a flux of configurations. In itself such a material is senseless, valueless, purposeless. It just does what it does do, following a fixed routine imposed by external relations which do not spring from the nature of its being.  It is this assumption that I call "scientific materialism." Also it is an assumption which I shall challenge as being entirely unsuited to the scientific situation at which we have now arrived.
  In Whitehead's view, there are a number of problems with this notion of "irreducible brute matter". First, it obscures and minimizes the importance of change.  By thinking of any material thing (like a rock, or a person) as being fundamentally the same thing throughout time, with any changes to it being secondary to its "nature", scientific materialism hides the fact that nothing ever stays the same.  For Whitehead, change is fundamental and inescapable; he emphasizes that "all things flow."
  In Whitehead's view, then, concepts such as "quality", "matter", and "form" are problematic. These "classical" concepts fail to adequately account for change, and overlook the active and experiential nature of the most basic elements of the world. They are useful abstractions, but are not the world's basic building blocks. What is ordinarily conceived of as a single person, for instance, is philosophically described as a continuum of overlapping events. After all, people change all the time, if only because they have aged by another second and had some further experience.  These occasions of experience are logically distinct, but are progressively connected in what Whitehead calls a "society" of events. By assuming that enduring objects are the most real and fundamental things in the universe, materialists have mistaken the abstract for the concrete (what Whitehead calls the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness").
  To put it another way, a thing or person is often seen as having a "defining essence" or a "core identity" that is unchanging, and describes what the thing or person really is. In this way of thinking, things and people are seen as fundamentally the same through time, with any changes being qualitative and secondary to their core identity (e.g. "Mark's hair has turned gray as he has gotten older, but he is still the same person"). But in Whitehead's cosmology, the only fundamentally existent things are discrete "occasions of experience" that overlap one another in time and space, and jointly make up the enduring person or thing. On the other hand, what ordinary thinking often regards as "the essence of a thing" or "the identity/core of a person" is an abstract generalization of what is regarded as that person or thing's most important or salient features across time.  Identities do not define people, people define identities.  Everything changes from moment to moment, and to think of anything as having an "enduring essence" misses the fact that "all things flow", though it is often a useful way of speaking.
  Whitehead pointed to the limitations of language as one of the main culprits in maintaining a materialistic way of thinking, and acknowledged that it may be difficult to ever wholly move past such ideas in everyday speech. After all, each moment of each person's life can hardly be given a different proper name, and it is easy and convenient to think of people and objects as remaining fundamentally the same things, rather than constantly keeping in mind that each thing is a different thing from what it was a moment ago.  Yet the limitations of everyday living and everyday speech should not prevent people from realizing that "material substances" or "essences" are a convenient generalized description of a continuum of particular, concrete processes.  No one questions that
caption: John Locke was one of Whitehead's primary influences.  In the preface to Process and Reality, Whitehead wrote: "The writer who most fully anticipated the main positions of the philosophy of organism is John Locke in his Essay."[5]
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