Prehension is Alfred North Whitehead’s term for the way one actual occasion grasps, receives, or takes account of another. The word is chosen to avoid the intellectualist connotations of “perception” or “apprehension” — prehension is not necessarily conscious, not necessarily cognitive, and not limited to organisms. Every actual occasion prehends the occasions in its past, and this prehension is the basic relational act from which all else is built.
Whitehead distinguishes two primary kinds: physical prehensions, in which an occasion receives the actualized data of a prior occasion (its achieved definiteness), and conceptual prehensions, in which an occasion grasps a possibility (an eternal object) without that possibility being derived from any particular past occasion. Complex prehensions combine both. The process of integrating prehensions into a unified experience is concrescence.
Prehension has a structure with three components: the prehending subject (the occasion in the process of becoming), the datum (what is prehended), and the subjective form (how the datum is received — with what valuation, intensity, or exclusion). Negative prehension is also possible: an occasion can exclude a datum from its integration, and this exclusion is itself constitutive.
For relational ontology, prehension is the key concept. It is the mechanism by which relations constitute their terms: an actual occasion has no character apart from its prehensions. The occasion is not a thing that then prehends; it is a prehending that achieves thingness. This makes prehension the process-philosophical analog of what the semiotic universe formalizes algebraically: the constitution of structure through relational acts.
Related terms
- Actual occasion — the entity that prehends and is prehended
- Concrescence — the integration of prehensions into unity
- Eternal object — what conceptual prehension grasps
- Event — the broader category of happenings
- Relational ontology — the philosophical position prehension enacts