A nexus (plural: nexūs) is Alfred North Whitehead’s term for any particular fact of togetherness among actual occasions. Whenever occasions are related through mutual prehension — whenever they take account of one another — they form a nexus. The concept is broader than society: every society is a nexus, but not every nexus is a society, because a nexus need not exhibit the ordered inheritance of a common form that defines a society.
A nexus is the public, objective fact that results from the private, subjective processes of concrescence. Each actual occasion, upon achieving satisfaction, perishes as a subject and becomes an object — a datum available for prehension. The nexus is the pattern of mutual objectification among a group of occasions: the way each has entered into the constitution of the others.
Whitehead introduces nexūs to avoid the assumption that reality comes pre-sorted into natural units. The world does not arrive already divided into things; rather, occasions form nexūs of varying degrees of order, and what we call “things” are nexūs that exhibit sufficient stability and internal organization to register as distinct. A disordered nexus is a mere aggregate — a crowd of occasions with no common form. An ordered nexus with a defining characteristic is a society. The transition from nexus to society is not a difference in kind but in degree of relational order.
Related terms
- Actual occasion — the members of any nexus
- Society — a nexus with a defining characteristic
- Prehension — the relational acts that constitute a nexus
- Satisfaction — the achieved occasion that becomes available to the nexus
- Creativity — the principle by which nexūs are produced