Objective immortality is Alfred North Whitehead’s term for the way a completed actual occasion continues to have reality after it perishes as a subject. When an occasion reaches satisfaction, it ceases to be a subject of experience — it is no longer becoming — but its achieved character is not lost. It becomes an object: a datum available for prehension by every subsequent occasion. In this sense it is immortal, though not as a persisting substance; it is immortal as an objective fact that conditions all future becoming.
The concept resolves a problem that substance metaphysics handles through the notion of persistence. In a substance framework, things endure by remaining self-identical through time. In process philosophy, nothing persists in that sense — each actual occasion happens once and is done. But the past is not annihilated. Every completed occasion contributes its achieved definiteness to the world, and this contribution is irrevocable. The past is objectively there, not as a living subject but as a settled fact that shapes what can happen next.
Objective immortality is what makes the universe cumulative. Each new occasion inherits the entire settled past through its prehensions, and its own satisfaction adds to that inheritance. The present is the creative frontier where the objectively immortal past is taken up and synthesized into something new through concrescence. Time, in this picture, is the transition from subjective immediacy to objective immortality — from becoming to having become.
Related terms
- Satisfaction — the transition point at which an occasion achieves objective immortality
- Prehension — how subsequent occasions take up the objectively immortal past
- Actual occasion — the entity that perishes as subject and lives on as object
- Concrescence — the process that integrates objectively immortal data into new becoming
- Creativity — the principle by which objective immortality becomes the material for novelty