FACT AND FORM

As described so far, Whitehead's universe of actual occasions is a world of sheer becoming. It is a Heraclitean cosmos in which ‘all things flow’. As he puts it:

Nevertheless, Whitehead is not oblivious of the fact that the world we inhabit is also a world of enduring objects:

This rival notion is not entirely wrong. Even a mountain can be conceptualised as an event if one considers its existence within the horizon of millennia instead of years. But the mountain does not exist in a flash in the way that the momentary actual occasions do. And the same is true of all macroscopic entities of everyday life, chairs and tables for instance, as well as our own bodies; we do grow and decay, yet not all of a sudden.

In order to account for permanence, Whitehead introduces new ontological categories. The first relevant concept is that of eternal object. Among the basic categories of his system, he explains, ‘actual entities and eternal objects stand out with a certain extreme finality’ (PR 22).

‘Eternal objects’ is, roughly, Whitehead's designation for what are traditionally called Universals. In spite of his characterisation of Western philosophy as ‘a series of footnotes to Plato’ (PR 39), they are not conceived as ontologically independent entities like Plato's Ideas. Rather, they are conceived after the guise of Aristotle as the forms of things, that is to say, they are nothing apart from the concrete objects that instantiate them. The reason behind this choice should be obvious.