| Traditionally it is argued, following Whitehead's own admittance, that his metaphysical project is fundamentally concerned with addressing the notion of substance. He maintains that many philosophical problems that have confined philosophers could be traced back to the employment of the concept of substance. As Whitehead writes: "All modern philosophy hinges around the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject-predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis." Therefore, many scholars assert that Whitehead's criticisms of substance are rooted in his rejection of the Lockean conception of substance that maintains that substance is a substratum in which various qualities inhere while it enjoys singular identity despite suffering from qualitative and spatial alterations through time. Consequently, Whitehead's main concern is to challenge this idea of enduring "stuff' that retains its self-identity by introducing actual occasions as the most fundamental building blocks of existence. This project, however, maintains that Whitehead's introduction of actual occasions as the replacement for enduring substances is still rooted in self-identity where the self, on the level of actual occasions, plays exactly the same role as substance; i.e., it contains an identity of every occasion. Whereas in the case of human beings the self is a rather complicated assumption because it exists within a timeframe, in the case of actual occasions endurance through time is not an issue, since actual occasions are the most fundamental beings of the time-space continuum. Hence, Whitehead sets out to redefine the most elementary building blocks of nature not in terms of immutable realities that are the conveyers of powers but rather in terms of actual occasions that are modeled on the structural complexities of the self; i.e., his thinking about the fundamental nature of reality is not based on the notion of vacuous actuality of material substance, which underlies scientific materialism, but on the fundamental attributes of the self that reveals itself through its own valuation. |
