Extensive continuity is a basic and pervasive feature of
our world. It is presupposed by scientific measurement and theory. Few philosophers have
appreciated its significance more than the inventor of the method of extensive
abstraction. Its way of defining a point in terms of ever decreasing volumes presupposes
infinite divisibility. Applied to spacetime, this means that every event is encompassed by
larger events and encompasses smaller events, without end. The world of events (for the
philosophy of nature) is thoroughly continuous. Nevertheless, "the ultimate
metaphysical truth is atomism" (PR 35).
Without some discontinuity, there would be no room for
concrescence, no room for becoming. There would be no way of distinguishing between the
coming into being of an event and that event itself. Continuous creation supposes there
can be creation at each instant only because the creator is outside time, but this cannot
apply to any self-creating squeezed into a second. In order to overcome the pervasive
continuity of time, some temporal atomicity is required to situate concrescent becoming.
Temporal atomism, however, cannot be adequately
comprehended on analogy with the more familiar material atomism. Whitehead found it
particularly difficult to determine precisely what was atomic, and how this fits with
extensive continuity. Is the occasion as a whole or in some undifferentiated sense
actually indivisible, or does it lie in the event brought into being, or in its act of
(self-)creation? All of these are options Whitehead investigates, and all but the last
prove ultimately to be unsatisfactory. Eventually, but only after about two and a
half-years, he will hit upon the approach that will guide his systematic elaboration of
the theory of concrescence (PR, part III).- This is found in the conclusion to his
Zeno-like argument (inserted in part II) that "in every act of becoming there is the
becoming of something which temporal extension; but that the act itself is not extensive,
in the sense that it is divisible into earlier and later acts of being" (PR 69). The
satisfaction is (coordinately) divisible, but not the concrescence.
Among the many shifts in Whitehead's philosophical
thinking that can be chartered, the two which are particularly basic both turn on the
issue of the exact nature of temporal atomism. The first has been frequently emphasized,
the second scarcely noticed. The first marks the difference between the earlier philosophy
of nature and the later metaphysical works. It is usually assumed that Science and the
Modern World as a whole introduces the shift, but it really takes place within that work.
The original Lowell Lectures of 1925 on which that book is based are much more continuous
with the philosophy of nature. Only later additions introduce the epochal theory of time
which is the basis for Whitehead's characteristic metaphysics.
The second shift, far less obvious but no less basic,
here concerning the theory of concrescence, takes place within Process and Reality itself.
The earlier theory conceives concrescence as initiating from a single atomic datum (so the
original text of part II), the later with a multiplicity of past occasions physically
prehended (part III). Since the later theory is Whitehead's mature, final position, we are
apt to read past the clues for the earlier theory, supposing it to be only a vaguer
version of the official doctrine. Then the shift (and its wide-ranging significance) is
likely not to be noticed. This essay highlights this second shift by working out the
earlier attempts of Whitehead to understand concrescence, and the way in which they depend
upon different articulations of temporal atomism.
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