THE ACTUAL OCCASION AS A SUBJECT-SUPERJECT

It was argued in Chapter 1 that Whitehead rejects both materialism and traditional metaphysical idealism. What he strives to develop is a radically novel conception of the basic constituents of reality, one capable of bridging the gap between the ‘mental’ and the ‘physical’ without sacrificing either of these two apparently heterogeneous poles by declaring one of them unreal. Now it is time to turn to a direct consideration of this issue; this requires discussing some further aspects of Whitehead's complex notion of an actual occasion.

A moment of human mentality involves more than the retention of past experiences. Imagine you are reading a book in your room when you hear someone walking along the street. The steps suddenly enter your conscious awareness, while many of the pleasant phantasies and sensations associated with the reading vanish. Some elements have been retained, others have been excluded. At the same time, you experience the steps as an evolving series. They seem to be arising from the past, but there is also a suggestion in your present consciousness that they will continue into the immediate future. Each moment of experience is a Janus-faced entity. It has a selective relationship with things just gone, while also foreshadowing events to come: ‘The present,’ Whitehead writes, ‘bears in its own realized constitution relationships to a future beyond itself’ (AI 191). As he alternatively puts it: ‘[e]ach moment of experience confesses itself to be a transition between two worlds, the immediate past and the immediate future’ (AI 192).

This phenomenological analysis provides the basis for the metaphysical doctrine that each experiential occasion begins its life as a subject that incorporates aspects of its precursor, before suffering deposition by turning into an object for a new occasion. In retrospect, an individual's psychical life is a chain of moments of experience that have become available for prehensions to later actualities. Whitehead's actual occasions are subjects-becoming-objects: ‘The occasion arises from relevant objects, and perishes into the status of an object for other occasions’ (AI 177).