A negative prehension is an actual occasion’s exclusion of a datum from its process of concrescence. Where a positive prehension integrates a datum into the occasion’s becoming — grasping it, valuing it, making it ingredient in the emerging unity — a negative prehension sets a datum aside. The datum is felt as irrelevant, incompatible, or to be excluded, and this exclusion is itself a constitutive act.
Alfred North Whitehead insists that negative prehensions are real components of an occasion’s experience, not mere absences. An occasion that excludes a possibility is different from an occasion for which that possibility was never available. The exclusion shapes what the occasion becomes: its definiteness is a function of what it integrates and what it sets aside. A particular shade of red is achieved not only by positively grasping that shade but by negatively prehending other shades, other qualities, other modes of definiteness.
This has consequences for relational ontology. If an entity is constituted by its relations, then the relations it does not sustain are as significant as the relations it does. Determination is always also elimination: to become this is to not become that. The subjective aim guides this process of selection and exclusion, and the pattern of negative prehensions is part of what makes each occasion’s satisfaction a novel achievement rather than a mechanical summation of its inputs.
Negative prehension also explains how occasions in the same environment can achieve different characters. Two occasions prehending the same past may integrate and exclude different data, arriving at different satisfactions. The world provides the material; the occasion’s pattern of positive and negative prehensions determines what it makes of that material.
Related terms
- Prehension — the broader category of which negative prehension is one mode
- Actual occasion — the entity that negatively prehends
- Subjective aim — guides which data are excluded
- Concrescence — the process within which negative prehensions occur
- Satisfaction — shaped by the pattern of exclusions as much as by inclusions
- Eternal object — unrealized eternal objects are negatively prehended