Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects

Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects

Matthew David Segal

‘There is one point as to which you–and everyone–misconstrue me–obviously my usual faults of exposition are to blame. I mean my doctrine of eternal objects.’
–Alfred North Whitehead in a letter to Charles Hartshorne (1936)

‘…the forms are essentially referent beyond themselves. It is mere phantasy to impute to them any ‘absolute reality,’ which is devoid of implications beyond itself. The realm of forms is the realm of potentiality, and the very notion of potentiality has an external meaning. It refers to life and motion. It refers to hope, fear, and intention. Phrasing this statement more generally,–it refers to appetition. It refers to the development of actuality, which realizes form and is yet more than form. It refers to past, present, and future.’
–Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (1938)

Alfred North Whitehead’s first book as a professor of philosophy at Harvard University, Science and the Modern World (1925)3, is not only a historical treatment of the rise and fall of scientific materialism. It also marks his turn to metaphysics in search of an alternative cosmological scheme that would replace matter in motion with organic process as that which is generic in Nature. Among the metaphysical innovations introduced in this book are the somewhat enigmatic ‘eternal objects,’ a category not without its detractors even among those otherwise positively disposed to Whitehead’s process philosophy. The publication of the first and second volumes of Whitehead’s Harvard Lectures on the philosophical presuppositions (HL14) and general metaphysical problems (HL25) of science provides students of his corpus with an opportunity to catch the thinker in the act of creating his concepts. In searching through student notes for glimpses of what Whitehead really meant, I have kept in mind his admonition that ‘no thinker thinks twice’ (PR 29). Whitehead never ceased philosophizing, and surely intended for us to continue thinking with but beyond the letter of his ideas. In this spirit and in light of HL1 and HL2, this paper seeks not only to elucidate the role of eternal objects as a category of existence in Whitehead’s Philosophy of Organism, but also to acknowledge areas that remain obscure, at least to this author.


I begin by introducing Whitehead’s initial conception of the realm of eternal objects in Science and the Modern World, fleshing out his published presentation with relevant notes from his Harvard lectures delivered concurrently. I also draw upon his more developed exposition in Process and Reality (1929) and his late lecture at Harvard, ‘Mathematics and the Good’ (1940), with the goal not simply of textual exegesis but of showing how the meaning of the fifth
category of existence is exemplified in the gradual ingression of the idea into Whitehead’s imagination. I then offer short rejoinders to some prominent critics of Whitehead’s account of possibility, including Charles Hartshorne, Victor Lowe, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty. Given all the controversy and disagreement on the subtlest points of Whitehead’s doctrine over many decades of interpretation, I cannot now pretend in this chapter to resolve the final meaning, much less establish, either the metaphysical necessity or extravagance of eternal objects. I aim only to
sustain the effort at constructive thought begun by Whitehead, making his speculative hypothesis Published in Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927 ed. by Joseph Petek and Brian Henning (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) as explicit as possible while exploring the applications of his idea of ideas to the interpretation of
experience, thus better preparing it for critical improvement (PR xiv).