Chapter 6 Consequences

Whitehead’s “free and savage creation of concepts ” (Stengers 2002b) goes well beyond anything that I have discussed in this book. I have scarcely considered, for instance, Whitehead’s important theory of propositions (cf. especially 1929/1978, 184-207), and of the ways that these serve as “lures for feeling ” (25, 85ff., 184ff.), linking the potential to the actual. Nor have I gone into his extensive reflections upon “hybrid prehensions, ” those perceptions and feelings that have both “phys-ical ” (material, causal) and “conceptual ” (mental, potential, or hypothetical) as-pects, and that are crucial, in turn, to his accounts of “symbolic reference ” (168-183), language, and the emergence of consciousness. Moreover, I have not said nearly enough about the crucial distinction between “actual entities ” or “actual oc-casions, ” the ultimate atomistic components of the universe in Whitehead’s meta-physics, and the aggregations of these entities that Whitehead calls “societies,” which include ourselves, and all the things that we come upon in the course of everyday experience. I have also not considered Whitehead’s mathematics, or the question of how his thought relates to modern physics (relativity and quantu