You're viewing as a guest. Sign in to save progress and pick up where you left off.
Step 4 of 7~8 min read~29 min left
The Throbbing Emotion of the Past
Examine Whitehead's most evocative descriptions of prehension and ==actual occasion==s.
“Each actual entity is conceived as an act of experience arising out of data. It is a process of 'feeling' the many data, so as to absorb them into the unity of one individual satisfaction. Each actual entity is a throb of experience including the actual world within its scope. [...] The creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurling itself into a new transcendent fact. [...] Prehension is not simply a theory about our knowledge of reality, it is part of a description of reality as a nexus of feelings. The world is not merely seen; it is felt forward, moment by moment, in an complex latticework of relations. — Whitehead, Process and Reality (1929); BRLSI 'A.N. Whitehead's Process and Reality'; Footnotes2Plato 'Whitehead's Revolutionary Concept of Prehension' (2025)”