Audience: readers who have completed the concrescence and creativity lesson.
Learning goal: explain how process philosophy accounts for enduring objects through the concept of society.
If the fundamental units of reality are momentary actual occasions that happen once and perish, how do we account for the enduring objects of everyday experience — the chair that remains a chair, the person who persists through decades, the electron that traces a path through a cloud chamber?
Whitehead’s answer is the society. A society is a group of actual occasions that share a common form — a defining characteristic — inherited from predecessors through prehension and reproduced in each new member’s concrescence. The chair is not a substance that persists; it is a society of occasions in which a chair-pattern is transmitted from one generation to the next. Persistence is not a given but an achievement of relational process.
The broader category is the nexus: any particular fact of togetherness among actual occasions. Every society is a nexus, but not every nexus is a society. A society requires ordered inheritance of a common form; a mere nexus is any grouping of mutually related occasions. The world does not arrive pre-sorted into natural units — occasions form nexūs of varying degrees of order, and what we call “things” are nexūs organized enough to register as distinct.
Societies vary in complexity. Simple, linear societies (a series of electron-occasions) involve the repetition of a simple pattern. Structured societies (organisms) coordinate multiple subordinate societies into an overarching pattern. The most complex structured societies achieve novelty, responsiveness, and — in rare cases — consciousness.
This analysis has consequences beyond metaphysics. If endurance requires the ongoing reproduction of a defining pattern through relational acts, then every persistent structure — biological, social, cultural, ecological — is maintained by work. When the relational work stops, the pattern dissolves. A tradition persists because people reproduce it. An ecosystem persists because organisms sustain the relational patterns that constitute it. Identity is never a fait accompli; it is always an ongoing process.
Check for understanding: What makes a society different from a mere nexus?