Audience: readers who have completed the actual occasions and prehension lesson.
Learning goal: explain how concrescence produces determinate occasions and how creativity names the universe’s ongoing novelty.
An actual occasion begins as an open potentiality — defined by its initial data (the prehended past) and its subjective aim (a lure toward a particular form of integration) — and concludes by achieving a definite, novel unity: its satisfaction. The internal process of moving from potentiality to definiteness is concrescence (from the Latin concrescere, to grow together).
Concrescence proceeds in phases. In the initial phase, physical prehensions supply the raw data from prior occasions. In supplementary phases, conceptual prehensions introduce eternal objects (possibilities) that shape how the data is valued, contrasted, and organized. The subjective aim guides the integration, but the occasion is not rigidly determined by its aim — it may depart from the initial lure and achieve a form of definiteness that was not originally aimed at. This capacity for departure is the basis of freedom in Whitehead’s system.
At satisfaction, the occasion is fully determinate. It perishes as a subject — ceasing to be an experiencing process — and becomes an object: a datum available for prehension by future occasions. This transition from subjective immediacy to objective availability is what generates the forward movement of time.
Creativity names the general principle at work in every concrescence: the many become one and are increased by one. Each occasion takes in a multiplicity of data and synthesizes a novel unity that did not exist before, adding itself to the multiplicity for future occasions. Creativity is not an agent or a force; it is the abstract principle that novelty is real — that each moment of experience is a genuine creation, not merely a rearrangement of what already exists.
Together, concrescence and creativity describe a universe that is an ongoing adventure of self-creation. There is no external agent making the world; each actual occasion makes itself through the creative integration of what it inherits. This is how process philosophy avoids both determinism and arbitrary chance: every occasion is conditioned by its past but not determined by it, because the creative act of concrescence always introduces something new.
Check for understanding: What is the difference between concrescence and creativity?