In Alfred Whitehead’s process philosophy, eternal objects are pure potentials: qualities, patterns, and forms that are available for ingression into actual occasions, but are not themselves “actual.”
Examples of eternal objects are a shade of blue, a mathematical ratio, or a spatial pattern. They don’t exist in the way actual occasions do, through the process of concrescence; they subsist as possibilities that may or may not be realized in any particular occasion.
Eternal objects serve a similar function in Whitehead’s system that universals plan in Aristotelian and Platonic metaphysics, but with a crucial difference: eternal objects are not substances or forms imposed on matter. They are potentials that acquire definiteness only through their ingression into actual occasions — through the way an occasion selects and integrates them via conceptual prehension. An eternal object apart from any ingression is a bare potential, not an actuality.
Eternal objects have a dual aspect. Each has an individual essence (what it is in itself, apart from any realization) and a relational essence (the way its ingression into one occasion conditions its possible ingression into others). This relational essence connects eternal objects to the formal structures of this research program: the relational essence of an eternal object is a function from contexts of ingression to modes of definiteness, which is structurally analogous to the typed operators of the semiotic universe.
Related terms
- Actual occasion — the entities into which eternal objects ingress
- Concrescence — the process that selects and integrates eternal objects
- Prehension — conceptual prehension grasps eternal objects
- Process — the broader metaphysical framework