Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology

Whitehead argues that the fundamental realities of the universe are 'actual entities'—momentary occasions of experience that become, are felt, and then perish, rather than enduring substances that persist through change. The book rejects the 'fallacy of misplaced concreteness' that treats abstract categories like substance, quality, and matter as the primary constituents of reality. In their place, Whitehead constructs a categoreal scheme whose two fundamental types of entity are actual entities and eternal objects, with God functioning as the principle of concretion that lures the process forward. The aim is a philosophical cosmology coherent with modern science and adequate to the fullness of experience, not a deductive system claiming certainty.

Actual entities are the final real things of which the world is made—momentary droplets of experience, each a process of prehending its environment and achieving a determinate unity before perishing. Eternal objects are pure potentials, forms of definiteness that can be ingressed into actual entities but have no actuality on their own. Whitehead places them on the same plane of finality because they are the two irreducible dimensions of reality: actuality and potentiality . Without eternal objects, there would be no novelty; without actual entities, there would be no realization. The categoreal scheme of Process and Reality is built around the relations between these two poles, with God as the ultimate ground of their conjunction.

The original 1929 edition suffered from hundreds of errors and over three hundred discrepancies between the American (Macmillan) and English (Cambridge) editions, which had different formats and paginations . Whitehead wrote quickly and revised extensively, and the text was not carefully proofread. The need for a corrected edition was felt for decades. In 1978, David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne published a corrected edition with the Free Press, based on a collation of the original editions and Whitehead's manuscripts . This edition has become the standard scholarly text. Readers working closely with Process and Reality should consult the corrected edition, as the original pagination and errors can compound the difficulty of an already demanding book.

Whitehead wrote immediately after publication that he did not expect a good reception from professional philosophers . His expectation was largely correct in the short term. It took nearly thirty years before scholars seriously began to try to decipher the book as a whole, and even today some 'professional Whiteheadians' argue that the work can be bracketed by anyone seeking a clear picture of Whitehead's speculative agenda . The difficulty of the prose, the novel terminology, and the sheer ambition of the scheme deterred many readers. The book's reception was further complicated by the fact that Whitehead never regarded Process and Reality as his own favorite among his works; he more often referred to Science and the Modern World, Adventures of Ideas, and Modes of Thought .

Whitehead described Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas as supplementing each other's omissions or compressions. Science and the Modern World (1925) diagnoses the philosophical assumptions of modern science and calls for a new scheme of categories; Process and Reality (1929) provides that scheme in its most systematic form; Adventures of Ideas (1933) applies it to the philosophy of civilization . Victor Lowe, a first-generation interpreter, argued that after Process and Reality no novel departures occur in Whitehead's system, and that it must remain the indispensable book . Later scholars have complicated this view, noting that Whitehead's thought continued to develop and that his later works refine and sometimes modify the system of Process and Reality.

God in Whitehead's scheme is not a transcendent creator who exists apart from the world, but an actual entity—the 'principle of concretion' that provides the initial aims for all other actual entities and thereby orders the creative advance. God has two natures: a primordial nature, which is the realm of eternal objects ordered toward relevance, and a consequent nature, which is the reception of all that happens in the world into a harmonious unity that never perishes. This God is not omnipotent in the classical sense; God persuades rather than coerces, and the world's freedom is genuine. Whitehead's God is thus dipolar, temporal in one aspect and eternal in another, and intimately involved in the process of becoming rather than standing outside it.

A common misreading treats Process and Reality as a deductive metaphysical system that claims to derive reality from first principles with certainty. Whitehead's method is explicitly speculative and experimental: he describes it as an 'adventure' in which the scheme must be adequate to experience and logically coherent, but never final. The book's preface states that the positive doctrine concerns the becoming, being, and relatedness of actual entities, but this is a hypothesis to be tested against experience, not a dogma . Whitehead was aware of the inadequacy of all systematic thought and approached system-building with a certain playfulness, trying out schemes to see what they could do . Reading the book as a closed system misses its tentative, exploratory character.