The Structure of Credition in Whitehead’s Metaphysics of Experience

Abstract

The locus of credition in Whitehead’s Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology (PR) would clearly be the section “Higher Phases of Experience,” which has rarely been analysed in detail. Whitehead refers to belief at one point of his analysis of feeling, claiming that “the final real things of which this world is made up” (18) are actual occasions or momentary self-constituting actual occasions. To understand social and historical phenomena, it is necessary to look at ‘societies’ in which actual entities are embedded. This is because, as Whitehead states, an “actual occasion has no history. It never changes. It only becomes and perishes” Whitehead (Adventures of Ideas. Free Press, New York, 1933/1967, 204). Therefore, it follows that one should analyse one such embedding phenomena, namely religion.