Liu, Tong Hui. "Becoming and Transcendence- An Exploration into Whitehead's Actual Entity."
Abstract
This dissertation is on the
interpretaion of Whitehead's actual entity and its features.
This dissertation consists of three chapters and its main content is as
follows:
In Chapter one I try to analyse
the philosophical background of why Whitehead advances the theory of
actual entity and the purpose of it. Whitehead thinks that
there is a fallacy of misplaced concreteness in modern science, that
is, the manifold and complex experiences are generalized abstractly as
simple matter which is then regarded as the concrete reality.
Thus nature is divided into two parts: appearance and
reality. Behind this fallacy is the theory of substance in
traditional philosophy in which the substance is independent, isolated
and has no relation to others. whitehead does't agree with
this theory. He thinks that it is drops of experience, that
is, actual entities, not substance, that are the final real things of
which the world is made up. On the one hand he keeps the
structure of subject-object of modern philosophy, and gives actual
entities the characteristics of self-determination such as subjective
aim and subjective form; on the other hand, he removes consciousness
out of the prerequistie of the subjectivist principle.
In chapter two I attempt to
explore the relatedness and process phase of actual entities.
The essence of an actual entity consists solely in the fact that it is
a prehending thing, which necessarily means it is a subject prehending
and meantime an object being prehended. It is a superject
which transcends the traditional separation between subjects and
objects. By prehension, negative or positive, all entities in
the universe are related to each other. With regard to
process, Whitehead thinks process is reality; it is the process of
becoming of actual entities. There are two species of
process: concrescence and transition. The former is the
process from 'many' to 'one' while the latter from 'one' to 'many',
which the satisfied actual entity is objectified. The eternal
object as pure possibility explains how an actual entity can be created
from the past to novelty, so I concern about its characteristics and
relatedness to actual entities.
In chapter three I try to delve into the significance of the theory of actual entities for modern society, especially on its constructive postmodern dimension and in the field of ecological ethics. Because of Whitehead's criticism of traditional metaphysics and his emphasis on the environment of an actual entity, his philosophy is considered as a substitute for mechanical materialism. Man and nature are a whole organism and like man, nature also has subjectivity. Also because of his criticism of the thought of substance behind modernity and his transcendence over the separation between subjects and objects, his philosohpy is regarded as the source of constructive postmodernism and so is related to many modern social problems.