Concrescence (from the Latin concrescere, to grow together) is Alfred North Whitehead’s term for the process by which an actual occasion constitutes itself as a determinate unity from the multiplicity of its prehensions. It is the internal process of becoming: the 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 it concludes by achieving a definite, novel unity — its “satisfaction.”
Concrescence has a temporal structure but is not in physical time. The occasion does not persist through time while concrescing; rather, the concrescence is the occasion’s entire existence as a subject. Once satisfaction is achieved, the occasion perishes as a subject and becomes an object — a datum for future occasions to prehend. Physical time is the serial order of completed concrescences, not a container in which they occur.
The process involves phases of integration. In the initial phase, physical prehensions of past occasions provide the raw data. In supplementary phases, conceptual prehensions introduce eternal objects (possibilities) that shape how the data is valued and organized. The subjective aim — initially derived from the primordial nature of God in Whitehead’s system, though the concept can be secularized — guides the integration toward a particular form of definiteness. The result is a novel entity that is more than the sum of its data: it is a creative synthesis.
For this research program, concrescence models what the closure operators of the semiotic universe formalize: the achievement of a determinate semiotic structure from the open field of possible interpretations. The semantic, syntactic, and fusion closures of the semiotic universe are, in process-philosophical terms, the formal structure of concrescence applied to signs.
Related terms
- Actual occasion — the entity that concresces
- Prehension — the relational acts that provide concrescence its data
- Eternal object — the possibilities that shape the process
- Process — the broader category of becoming