Part 2: Time
Our consideration of the past and of the future will be limited to what Whitehead calls “the immediate past” and “the immediate future.” The immediate past is defined by a magnitude of duration in the order of a second or of fractions of a second antecedent to the present moment. The immediate future is defined as the second or fractions of a second consequent to the present moment. The extended past and the extended future do exist, the existence of laws and train schedules testify to it, but they are mere conceptual propositions of the human mind, having no actual existence. As a consequence of considering the past in terms of the extended past and the future in terms of the extended future, “we [will] conceive ourselves as related to past or to future by a mere effort of purely abstract imagination, devoid of direct observation of particular fact.” [247]
The immediate past and the immediate future, however, do have actual existence and are more than mere conceptual propositions of the human mind. “The past has an objective existence in the present which lies in the future beyond itself,” [246] “the future is immanent in occasions antecedent to itself,” [246] and “contemporary occasions are immanent in each other.” [246] Whitehead says very strongly, “cut away the future and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content.” [246] Likewise, without the past, the present would have no foundation upon which to build itself and would, similarly, be emptied of its content. Since, then, the past has objective existence in the present, and the future is “immanent” in the present, it is clear that both past and future bear real relationships to the present which are more than “mere abstract imagination.”
The past has objective existence in the present because “the various particular occasions of the past are in existence, and are severally functioning as objects for prehension in the present.” [250] The particular occasions of the past exist in the present as actual occasions which have achieved their satisfaction, completed their process, and have passed into objective immortality to become a datum for novel concrescence. “This individual objective existence of the actual occasions of the past, each functioning in each present occasion, constitutes the causal relationship which is efficient causation.” [251]
According to Whitehead, “it belongs to the essence of ‘the immediate subject’ [a present actual occasion] that it pass into objective immortality.” [248] The very constitution of the immediate subject “involves that its own activity of self-formation passes into its activity of other-formation.” [248] Through the passage into objective immortality, the satisfied concrescence becomes a concrete foundation from which the present creates itself into the novel future, which it does by virtue of the necessity inherent in its own constitution. In this way, the particular occasions of the past exist in the present as entities “having become,” or “having been.” The past itself exists in the present as the eternal “substance” from which and in conformity with which the present constitutes itself.
The future also exists in the present, but in a much different way from that in which the past exists in the present. The future has objective reality in the present, but no formal actuality. Unlike the particular occasions of the past, “in the present, the future occasions, as individual realities with their measure of absolute completeness, are nonexistent.” [247] In the present, future occasions have not yet undergone their process of concrescence and can, consequently, have no full measure of actual existence for prehension in the present. In this way, the future does not exist in the present as an actual datum. The future is, rather, “immanent in the present by reason of the fact that the present bears in its own essence the relationships which it will have to the future.” [250] The future exists in the present in the mode of “objective reality.” It is “objective” in that it concerns the objective existence of the present occasion, but merely “real” in that it has not yet become completely actual.
Power up and Steem on!