Whitehead’s Account of the Least Units of Reality
by Bill Meacham, Ph.D.
Copyright © 2025 Bill Meacham
In my last article for this journal, we saw that actual entities, also termed, with one important exception, “actual occasions,” are the fundamental building blocks of reality according to 20th century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. We saw that they constitute themselves by incorporating aspects of the world around them, a process Whitehead calls “prehension.” This time we’ll take a look at them in more detail.
Whitehead’s view is atomistic; he takes the world to be composed of tiny entities that are not further decomposable. It is also dynamic; in contrast to classical physics, he asserts that these entities are not bits of inert stuff but rather events, and these events are inherently intertwined and related to each other.
He wrote at a time when quantum mechanics was being developed, and the mysterious behavior of reality at the subatomic level informed his thinking. Entities submicroscopically small are not material as we generally think of materiality. Quantum-level entities do not bounce around at the mercy of external forces like billiard balls; instead, they seem to have a quasi-existence in a field of mere potentiality until they are detected, then they become actual. The interaction between them and someone or something else that detects them is essential to their existence. Reality at that level is relational and dynamic.
