(This essay originally appeared in the online journal Drops & Buds, Autumnal Equinox 2025 edition.)

Displayed prominently on a website devoted to transpersonal psychologist Stan Grof’s teaching is an ancient Greek proverb: “Know Thyself.”^[1] Clearly, the nature of the self is of extreme importance for Grof. He says,

Spiritual intelligence is the capacity to conduct our life in such a way that it reflects deep philosophical and metaphysical understanding of reality and of ourselves discovered through personal experience during systematic spiritual pursuit.^[2]

The admonition to know and understand ourselves can be taken in two ways. First, we can learn things peculiar to each of us such as our talents and limits, the events that formed our personality, our deep fears and aspirations and the like. But we can also take it in a more general sense. What are structures of the self common to all people? How do those structures fit into a broad account of the whole of reality? Seeking the philosophical and metaphysical understanding of reality that Grof advocates, Alfred North Whitehead addresses these questions.

Whitehead’s goal is “to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.”[3] One of those elements is ourself, that is, the self that each one of us is. Whitehead needs to account for our sense that we are both a central vantage point to which our world appears and an agent making decisions and taking action in that world. The self is that which provides “central direction” to the whole psycho-physical organism that we are. He says,

in the case of the higher animals there is central direction, which suggests that in their case each animal body harbours a living person …. Our own self-consciousness is direct awareness of ourselves as such persons.^[4]

Whitehead’s terminology is unfortunate. He calls the self of animals, including humans, a “living person,” but most people would not consider non-human animals as persons (although some might make an exception for a favorite pet). The term “person” in everyday usage means a human being. In a legal context, a person is any entity that can possess rights and obligations, and can be a party to legal proceedings.[5] Whitehead uses the term differently. To understand it we need to put it in the context of his ontology, that is, his classification of the kinds of things that exist. In increasing order of specificity, they are the following:

• Actual occasion
• Nexus
• Society
• Society with personal order (also called an enduring object)
• Corpuscular society
• Structured society, which contains
  • One or more subservient societies or nexuses
  • One or more regnant societies or nexuses
• Living society, a variety of structured society
• Living person, a variety of living society

That’s quite a list. Let’s consider each one in turn.

In Whitehead’s view, the most fundamental unit of reality is the actual occasion, also termed “actual entity.” Each actual occasion is momentary, coming into being, going through various phases and then passing away; and each one experiences, in a primitive way, its past and its present surroundings, a process that Whitehead calls “prehension.” (Please see my earlier essay “The Least Units of Reality” for a fuller exposition.)

A group of actual occasions that prehend each other Whitehead calls a “nexus,” a Latin word meaning a binding together. A nexus is any group of occasions that are related to each other by mutual prehension. It’s a very broad term. A nexus is any “particular fact of togetherness among actual entities.”[6] In other words, a nexus is just a bunch of actual entities that are related to each other, if only because they are nearby. (In Latin the plural of “nexus” is “nexūs,” pronounced as “nexoos.” Whitehead uses the Latin, but I use the more English-friendly “nexuses.”)

A more restricted form of nexus is the society, another unfortunate term that doesn’t mean what it ordinarily does. Rather than a community of people, Whitehead uses the term “society” to mean a nexus in which the member actual occasions have a common form prehended from each other. They are related such that some of them inherit characteristics of other ones.[7] Each member prehends not just the existence of the others as in a nexus, but something they all have in common. They share this characteristic by virtue of their prehensions of antecedent members of the same society.[8] A pile of sand is a nexus, but not a society. Each grain of sand, however, composed of molecules which are in turn composed of atoms, is a society.

The protons, neutrons and electrons within an atom are composed of actual occasions that occur in temporal sequence, one after another. Whitehead calls such a sequence “personal order.”[9] As mentioned above, this is an unfortunate use of the term “person,” but it’s what Whitehead gives us. A society with personal order is one that contains only one member at a time. An example is an electron in a carbon atom, which is composed of a temporal sequence of carbon-atom-electron occasions, each of which inherits from its predecessor a common character.[10] Whitehead calls such a personally-ordered society an enduring object.[11] However, he also uses “enduring object” and “enduring entity” more loosely to mean anything that is composed of one or more temporal series of actual occasions, from electrons to people, trees and houses, to stars and galaxies.[12]

The next most specific type of entity is the corpuscular society, which is a society composed of more than one personally-ordered society. Ordinary physical objects are corpuscular societies. For example, a stone comprises many molecules, each of which comprises one or more atoms, each of which comprises personally-ordered societies that we call protons, electrons, neutrons and other subatomic so-called particles. Whitehead says “a nexus which (i) enjoys social order, and (ii) is analysable into strands of enduring objects [in his strict sense] may be termed a ‘corpuscular society.’”[13]

A structured society is a corpuscular society in which different components have different functions. Some are what he calls” regnant” and others, subservient.” A regnant society, as the name implies, is one that gives direction to or at least influences the behavior of the whole society of which it is a part. A subservient society or nexus follows the direction of the regnant society.[14]

Even more restricted is the living society, a type of structured society. The salient characteristic of life is that it can come up with novel behaviors instead of merely repeating what has gone on before. Non-living bodies exhibit “no originality in conceptual prehension.”[15] A stone just does what it does over and over again. It has no ability to envision anything else; it is all physical prehension, not conceptual. In contrast, “an organism is ‘alive’ when in some measure its reactions are inexplicable by any tradition of pure physical inheritance.”[16]

In each concrescent occasion [contained in a living society] its subjective aim originates novelty to match the novelty of the environment. … Structured societies [of this type] are termed ‘living.’ It is obvious that a structured society may have more or less ‘life,’ and that there is no absolute gap between ‘living’ and ‘non-living’ societies. … The primary meaning of ‘life’ is the origination of conceptual novelty—novelty of appetition.[17]

And finally, we come to the living person.

A living nexus … may support a thread of personal order along some historical route of its members. Such an enduring entity is a ‘living person.’ … The defining characteristic of a living person is some definite type of hybrid prehensions transmitted from occasion to occasion of its existence.[18]

And that’s what the self is for Whitehead, an enduring entity that is a component of a living society. Each of us is a psycho-physical being that persists through time, changing throughout but recognizably the same person because of our self’s persistence. In Process and Reality Whitehead calls this enduring object a “living person.” In a later work, Adventures of Ideas, he uses the more traditional term “soul” instead.[19]

Whitehead apparently hadn’t quite finalized his thoughts on this matter while writing Process and Reality. Originally thinking that inheritance via physical prehension alone precluded any introduction of novelty, he needed a way to account for the obvious capacity of living beings to respond to their environment in new and different ways as it changed. His solution was to posit a soul composed of conceptual prehensions, which do allow for novelty, that inhabits the physical body. He says it “lurks in the interstices of each living cell, and in the interstices of the brain”^[20] and “wanders from part to part of the brain, dissociated from the physical material atoms.”^[21] This notion certainly seems to imply that the soul and body are two distinct types of being, an idea antithetical to his desire for a metaphysical system applicable to every element of our experience. Later he came to a different solution, one that could alleviate the novelty issue. Without changing what he had already written, he incorporated into his discussion the notion of hybrid prehension.[22]

A hybrid prehension is “the prehension by one subject of a conceptual prehension … belonging to the mentality of another subject.”[23] It contains both physical and conceptual feelings. If an organism is composed of streams of actual occasions constituted by hybrid prehensions, we do not need to conceive it as requiring a separate soul floating around in its brain, and indeed Whitehead says as much. Continuing the thought, he says that “The defining characteristic of a living person is some definite type of hybrid prehensions transmitted from occasion to occasion of its existence.”[24]

This soul is not disembodied and ontologically separate from the body. It is not a res cogitans (thinking thing) as opposed to a res extensa (extended, or material, thing) as Descartes asserted. Just as each actual occasion is dipolar, having a physical and a mental aspect, so is everything composed of actual occasions. The soul, or self, is the mental aspect of an animal body (and of course humans are a type of animal).

That said, it is also something we can perceive. Recall that Whitehead says that “each animal body harbours a living person …. Our own self-consciousness is direct awareness of ourselves as such persons.”^[25] Presumably, then, we can come to know ourselves through introspection. But there is a problem with such an approach. What exactly is it that we come to know?

18^th century philosopher David Hume has an answer: there is no such thing! In a famous passage from his A Treatise of Human Nature he says,

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.[26]

When Hume introspectively looks for his soul, he finds only things which appear to him—thoughts, feelings, perceptions, emotions and the like—but not the self to which they appear. The self, he says, is “nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement.”[27]

Hume recognizes the transient and shifting nature of reality, as does Whitehead. But he takes for granted the materialistic view of nature that interprets the components of reality as inert substances to which things happen rather than dynamically self-creating experiential events. Hume can be faulted for having an inadequate metaphysics, but the issue remains. Within the state of constant change that constitutes our experience is there a thing-like “living person” or soul, or is there not?

The answer is not to be found in argumentation, but in observation. Both Whitehead and Grof insist on the primacy of actual experience in our attempt to make sense of ourselves and our world. Each one of us is faced with the question “Who or what are you?” And each of us must answer for ourself.

###

References

Cobb, John B. Jr. Whitehead Word Book. Claremont, CA: P&F Press, 2008. Online publication https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/whitehead/WordBookWeb.pdf as of 8 August 2021.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Originally published in 1739. Online publication https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/bigge-a-treatise-of-human-nature as of 23 June 2025.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press, 1967.

Whitehead, Alfred North. Process And Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Edition ed. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne. New York: The Free Press, 1978. Abbreviated in the notes as PR. (Original edition New York: Macmillan, 1929.)

Notes

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[1] https://www.stangrof.com as of 18 July 2025.

[2] https://www.azquotes.com/author/5951-Stanislav_Grof as of 18 July 2025.

[3] Whitehead, PR, p. 3.

[4] Whitehead, PR, p. 107.

[5] https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/legal_person as of 21 July 2025.

[6] Whitehead, PR, p. 20.

[7] Whitehead, PR, p. 34.

[8] Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, p. 28.

[9] Whitehead, PR, p. 34.

[10] Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, p. 44; Whitehead, PR, p. 34.

[11] Whitehead, PR, p. 34.

[12] Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, p. 29.

[13] Whitehead, PR, p. 35.

[14] Whitehead, PR, p. 103.

[15] Whitehead, PR, p. 101.

[16] Whitehead, PR, p. 104.

[17] Whitehead, PR, p. 102. 

[18] Whitehead, PR, p. 107.

[19] Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, pp. 208, 211 and 215.

[20] Whitehead, PR, pp. 105-106.

[21] Whitehead, PR, p. 109.

[22] Cobb, Whitehead Word Book, pp. 30-31, 45.

[23] Whitehead, PR, p. 107.

[24] Whitehead, PR, p. 107.

[25] Whitehead, PR, p. 107.

[26] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. Part IV, Section VI, “Of Personal Identity,” p. 173.

[27] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature. Part IV, Section VI, “Of Personal Identity,” p. 174.