Lesson · 4 min Stretch
Process, Not Things
In one line Whitehead held that the world is made of events and processes, not of fixed things, and that things are slow processes.
Alfred North Whitehead was an English mathematician who wrote Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell, then turned to philosophy at Harvard. In Process and Reality, from 1929, he argued that the basic units of the world are not lasting things but events, which he called actual occasions.
A stone, a cell or a person is a pattern of such events, inheriting from those before and passing something on. What looks solid is a slow, stable process. Whitehead warned against the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: mistaking a useful abstraction, such as a point or a bit of matter, for the concrete reality it was drawn from.
His view echoes Heraclitus, as the lesson The River shows, and it has shaped process theology and some ecological thinking.
Go deeper
Whitehead also gave a much-quoted summary of Western thought: that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato, meaning that Plato raised most of its lasting questions. His process philosophy influenced theologians such as Charles Hartshorne, who developed process theology, in which God too changes and responds to the world.
The old bridge
A town treats its stone bridge as a fixed thing that will always be there. Inspectors see it differently: water wears the piers, frost cracks the mortar, repairs replace stones.
Seen as a process, the bridge needs steady care to stay what it is. The town starts a maintenance fund instead of waiting for it to fail.
Try this today Pick something you think of as a fixed thing, a friendship or a team, and describe it as a process instead.
Cite or share this lesson
A plain reference you can paste into notes or an essay:
Quest2Reason. “Process, Not Things.” https://quest2reason.com/learn/lesson/process-not-things. Accessed 13 November 2026.
Sources
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Alfred North Whitehead” — Covers his mathematics, Process and Reality, actual occasions and misplaced concreteness.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “Process Philosophy” — Places Whitehead in a tradition running from Heraclitus to process theology.