Contemporary Natural Philosophy Needs a New Theory of Forms

In this disputation I was defending the thesis that contemporary natural philosophy needs a new process-relational theory of forms, and that Whitehead’s notion of eternal objects can play that role. Adam and Jacob structured the session as a kind of updated medieval disputatio: I offered a thesis and initial exposition; Jacob replied with critical questions; I responded; then Adam entered with his own objections and developments; and we ended with a more free-form exchange.

Reforming Platonism in the Context of the Evolution of Consciousness

I began by situating the realism/nominalism debate in an evolution of consciousness, drawing on Rudolf Steiner. I did not want the conversation to be a purely scholastic wrangle about universals; I wanted to frame nominalism and realism as historically and developmentally appropriate stages in how human beings relate to ideas.

In the ancient Greek origins of Western philosophy (ie, the physiologoi, and still residually in Plato and Aristotle), I suggested that ideas were experienced almost as perceived in the world, as though the intelligible structure of the cosmos shone through phenomena. With Christianity and the long interiorization of thought, ideas came to be experienced more as inner constructs. The medieval nominalists arise in part to protect divine omnipotence (God cannot be constrained by eternal structures), but on Steiner’s reading they also express the growing autonomy of the human “I”: ideas are now felt as something we make rather than something we receive. This trend intensifies in Kant, where categories are explicitly the mind’s contributions to a phenomenal world, while the “things in themselves” recede beyond our reach.

From this, I argued that nominalism has been developmentally necessary—it fostered modern science and the modern sense of self—but has become spiritually and conceptually constraining. We need a post-nominalist realism about form that does not regress to pre-modern essentialism. That is where I positioned Whitehead’s eternal objects.

I formulated my core thesis along these lines:

I am defending a reformed process-relational Platonism that entails the reality of an eternally evolving field of universal forms irreducible to but not ontologically independent of the historical accumulation of particular facts.

Then I sketched Whitehead’s account, wherein eternal objects provide a metaphysical condition for recognition of invariants and thus for scientific knowledge. Drawing on Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), I emphasized Whitehead’s claim that “objects enter into experience by recognition.” Science presupposes that “the same object is recognized as related to diverse events.” This recurrence is what makes invariant laws, measurements, and rational prediction possible. Eternal objects are not the same as laws of physics; laws and physical structures are historically emergent. Eternal objects are more basic: they express a structure of possibility that gives order to what has not yet been actualized.

Whitehead’s metaphysics constitutes an inversion of classical Platonism. Unlike the caricatured “two-world” Platonism (where Ideas are more real than appearances), Whitehead grants ontological priority to actual occasions of experience. Forms are real, but “deficient in actuality.” Forms do not act as efficient causes; they do not push the world around and are not stamped onto passive matter. Agency belongs to actual occasions and societies (enduring organisms, human minds, etc.), which select and ingress possibilities. So rather than the world being a pale copy of a higher realm, we have a world of concrete experiential events that draw from a field of potential form. It is a kind of inverted or reformed Platonism.

I also introduced my dialogue with Michael Levin: Levin’s “platonic morphospace” in developmental biology seems to require a genuine, non-reducible field of form guiding morphogenesis, especially via bioelectric patterning that can’t be reduced to genes alone. Levin tends to give morphospace itself the agency, turning organisms into puppets of the form-field. I’ve been pushing back with Whitehead: forms are real but not agents; organisms and occasions are the agents. I want to affirm Levin’s reintroduction of formal and final causality into biology while adjusting the metaphysics so we do not slip back into an over-strong, two-world Platonism.

Finally, I gestured toward Whitehead’s God: God gives a primordial valuation and ordering of eternal objects—a vector toward the True, the Good, and the Beautiful—but does not determine what is actualized. God’s consequent nature receives and integrates all finite decisions, leading to an “evolving eternity”: actual facts “cast the shadow of truth back upon the eternal.”

Jacob’s response: suspicion of forms and “eternal objects”

Jacob began by articulating some strong reservations about my view, especially around the notion of eternal objects.

From my perspective, his main points were:

* Theological unease and God-of-the-gaps worry

* He worried that eternal objects are more a theological than a philosophical posit. Whitehead, in his view, might be “too much of a theologian.”

* He raised the classic concern: are eternal objects and God filling explanatory gaps that could be handled by a more modest, empiricist account of abstraction?

* Analogy with the fallacy of misplaced concreteness

* Jacob wondered if eternal objects are in danger of reifying abstractions—exactly what Whitehead warns us against.

* He was unconvinced that invoking eternal objects avoids this fallacy rather than committing a more subtle version of it.

* Transcendence, normativity, and the danger of stifling novelty

* He associated Platonic form-talk with appeals to transcendence that smuggle in normative standards in ways that can stifle experiment and novelty (socially, ethically, politically).

* He acknowledged that Whitehead often seems to say something Platonist and then something apparently opposed in the same breath, which made it hard for him to see what exactly is being claimed.

* Two key questions: “eternal” and “objects”

* Why “eternal”? If the field of possibility is evolving, why use a term that classically implies immutability? Why not speak of “transient abstract structures” on a much larger timescale?

* Why “objects”? Given that eternal objects have no independent efficacy and reveal nothing without the world-process, in what sense are they “objects” at all?

* Why not just mind-based abstraction?

* Jacob asked why we need anything beyond the idea that abstraction is an emergent capacity of finite minds.

* For him, it is not clear why that is insufficient: we can imagine forms as patterns abstracted from experience without positing a separate category of “eternal objects.”

Overall, Jacob pressed me to explain:

* what problem eternal objects solve that a lean account of abstraction does not,

* and why their “eternal” and “object-like” status is warranted.

My response to Jacob: cosmologizing the transcendental

In responding to Jacob, I tried to clarify:

* Philosophical, not devotional, role of God

* I stressed that Whitehead invokes God as a metaphysical requirement to account for the transition from indefinite possibility to definite actuality, analogous (but not identical) to Aristotle’s metaphysical need for an unmoved mover.

* Historically, science itself, I argued, presupposes some faith in the commensurability of mind and nature. Whitehead believes this calls for metaphysical articulation, not just tacit acceptance.

* Eternal objects and the fallacy of misplaced concreteness

* Eternal objects are explicitly not concrete; they are pure potentialities. The fallacy, for Whitehead, is treating abstractions as if they were concrete. He is not denying the reality of abstraction.

* As Isabelle Stengers emphasizes, for Whitehead abstraction is part of nature—not an invention of language. Sense organs, nervous systems, all sorts of organisms already “abstract” by filtering and selecting relevant aspects of their environment.

* Why “eternal” and “object”?

* Eternal objects are “eternal” because they are not in space-time. Space-time, for Whitehead, is itself an abstraction—a network of metrical relations among occasions of experience. To treat space-time as concrete is itself a fallacy of misplaced concreteness.

* “Object,” in Whitehead’s technical vocabulary, simply means a potential that can be prehended, what can be taken as a potential ingredient in an occasion’s experience. “Actual subjects” (occasions) prehend “objects” (potentials). So “object” here names their role in experience, not a thing-like substance.

* Radical empiricism and the insufficiency of pure nominalism

* I appealed to the Peirce–James–Whitehead lineage: James’s nominalist pragmatism is, in Peirce and Whitehead’s view, not mathematically literate enough to support the precision and invariance required for science.

* From that perspective, a robust realism about form is a condition for making sense of scientific practice itself. Eternal objects are Whitehead’s way of giving that realism a processual, non-substantialist formulation.

In short, I tried to show that eternal objects are not ad hoc metaphysical luxuries but an attempt to “cosmologize the transcendental”: to give a cosmological account of the conditions of possibility for recurrence, measurement, and rational discourse itself.

Adam’s intervention: eternity, transcendental structure, and the Good beyond being

Adam then entered with three major themes:

* Why eternity matters for form

* He granted that one can imagine a more “bootstrapped” view of form: forms as emergent, contingent patterns that arise from the historical interplay of events, perhaps in the way Deleuze ontologizes Humean associationism.

* But he argued that this remains too contingent. Besides the contingency of particular forms, there is a deeper level: the conditions of possibility for the emergence and recombination of forms at all.

* Here Adam drew an analogy with Kant: Hume’s associationism explains our actual habits of thought; Kant’s transcendental arguments reveal the a priori structure needed for there to be experience and knowledge in the first place.

* Transposed to metaphysics: Whitehead’s eternal objects can be seen as a kind of cosmic a priori, the invariant patterning of possibility that makes the emergence of forms and their evolution intelligible.

He suggested that the “eternal” in eternal objects names exactly this: the definiteness and constraint structure of possibility, which does not itself change, even though the actual configurations and forms do.

* Questioning my strong process view of the knower

* Adam quoted a passage from my paper on eternal objects about how “no thinker thinks twice” because the self is a streaming society of actual occasions.

* He questioned whether this goes too far: is there not a genuine continuity and repetition in human knowing, grounded in memory, that is necessary for thought at all?

* In other words, he wondered if my process account might be overstating discontinuity at the expense of the coherence of the knowing subject.

* Creativity, the Good beyond being, and Whitehead’s God

* Adam brought in Plato’s “Good beyond being” and Nishitani’s śūnyatā (emptiness) as a luminous, pre-intelligible condition, nearer to us than anything else.

* He asked whether Whitehead has anything like this: is creativity analogous to the Good beyond being or śūnyatā?

* He worried that in Whitehead, God may lack the full transcendence of classical theism (the Augustinian God who is “closer to me than I am to myself” yet beyond all beings), and wondered whether Whitehead’s emphasis on process and concreteness risks losing this dimension.

Adam’s intervention helped sharpen the thought that eternal objects and Whitehead’s God can be read as metaphysical attempts to say something like: there is a non-contingent, non-spatiotemporal, value-laden condition for the emergence of novelty and form—akin to a processual version of Plato’s Good or Nishitani’s luminous emptiness.

My further clarifications: creativity, God, and evolving eternity

In replying to Adam, I emphasized that, at the level of cosmic epochs, I endorsed full anti-essentialism: laws of physics, elements, biological species, etc. are all historico-contingent “societies” (enduring patterns). At the metaphysical level, however, there must be some invariants if rational discourse and metaphysics are going to be possible at all. Eternal objects and actual occasions are those invariant categories.

Creativity is the ultimate, in Whitehead’s terms; God is “the first accident of creativity,” a creature of creativity. Yet how God exists—primordial valuation of possibility and consequent reception of actual history—is categorically necessary for any world in which experience and value occur. This allows a process version of something like the Good beyond being: the good beyond space-time, ordering possibilities without determining outcomes.

I reiterated that Whitehead’s “evolving eternity” need not be a contradiction if we distinguish the primordial nature of God (the ordered field of possibility, analogous to Nishitani’s illuminating emptiness) and the consequent nature, in which the achieved values of history are preserved. Eternity, on this view, is enriched by the passage of time, without undermining the non-spatiotemporal character of the field of possibility itself.

Regarding the knowing self, I stood by Whitehead’s notion that the finite subject is “occasional,” but acknowledged that the stream of occasions forming my personal ego-history does provide real continuity and memory—so the process view does not deny coherence, it relocates it.

Later discussion: Deleuze, the syntheses of time, and Nietzsche’s inverted Platonism

In the final part of the conversation, Jacob and Adam pushed further into Deleuze and Nietzsche. Jacob explored whether eternal objects might be best understood as transcendental structures akin to Deleuze’s virtual or to the “third synthesis of time” (the pure and empty form of time). He distinguished between the intensive field and processes of synthesis (contraction) that generate continuity, and the moment where synthesis breaks and a selection is made—a site where eternal objects might enter as the structured horizon of possible paths.

Adam brought in Nietzsche as another “inverter” of Platonism: For Nietzsche, we are trapped in the cave of intelligibility, trying to get back to the free air of sense. The ideal world is the fiction of a more primordial play of appearances. Deleuze inherits this: the intelligible is sculpted from the play of sense, not the other way around. We asked how Whitehead’s “inversion” differs: rather than simply reversing the hierarchy, he offers a dipolarity between concrete events and abstract potentials.

I suggested that Whitehead’s move preserves Nietzsche’s insight about the primacy of becoming and aesthetic evaluation, but insists that the very possibility of coherent discourse about becoming presupposes some real structure of possibility—what I am calling a reformed process-relational account of Platonic forms.

Outcome: agreement on the need for a new theory of forms

At the end, Adam and Jacob both assented to my thesis as formulated:

Contemporary natural philosophy needs a new theory of forms.

They did so without committing themselves to my preferred Whiteheadian solution in every detail, but they agreed on the central point: we cannot make sense of science, biology, and experience purely in terms of already-actual particulars and mind-invented names. Some kind of real field of form—however named (eg, as an immanent plane of viritual multiplicity or as a realm of eternal objects, etc)—must be acknowledged.

For my part, I tried to show that Whitehead’s eternal objects are not a relapse into “two-world” Platonism but a process-relational theory of form; that this theory can illuminate contemporary scientific work like Levin’s morphospace; and that it fits into a broader evolution-of-consciousness narrative where nominalism did necessary work, but now requires a higher synthesis.

The closing joke I offered captures the spirit of my position: nominalism can rename forms into oblivion, but the very capacity to coin and adjudicate the suitability of “mere names” already presupposes a shared space of meaning or semantic network that outruns any particular utterance. Whatever we decide in disputation, form is already at work in every act of judgement. In that sense, eternal objects—under one name or another—remain undefeated. 😊

Links to other essays mentioned in our disputation:

* “Standing Firm in the Flux: On Whitehead’s Eternal Objects” By Matthew David Segall in Whitehead at Harvard, 1925-1927 ed. by Joseph Petek and Brian Henning (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).

* “Whitehead’s Transcendental Cosmology: The Speculative Transformation of the Concept of Logical Construction” By James Bradley in Archives de Philosophie 56, 1993, 3-28.

* “Whitehead’s Niezsche: An Introduction to, and Presentation of A.N. Whitehead’s Marked Copy of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power” By Peter Sjöstedt-H in philosopher.eu (3: 2016).

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