THE EXTENSIVE CONTINUUM

Whitehead holds that anything appearing to us as a physical reality, such as a stone held in one’s hand or a mental reality, such as the thoughts initiated by Huck Finn’s question “Why can’t Miss Watson fat up?” involves the relatedness of prehensions.

For example, in responding to Huck’s question, a non-English speaking foreigner who understands nothing of the question may barely recognize a plaintive, “question asking” tone in the speaker’s voice and facial expression.  A professor of American Literature might see Twain’s compression, “fat up,” as a progenitor of the shortened and abrupt syntax of Hemingway’s early journalistic style; a revolt against the wordy, descriptive style of preceding nineteenth century writers.

Prehensions, as we have described, are our initial sensory and ideational responses to any stimuli within our conscious-unconscious spectrum of reception.  There are an indefinite number of potential selections of prehensions and actual entities in a concrescence of a stone or Miss Watson fatting up.  The choice of which entities are to be actualized is directed by subjective aim, for no matter how much is determined for the concrescence by the conditions from which it arises, immediate decisions contingent upon the limits set by the datum and the overview of subjective aim are required to select and process our prehensions. During concrescence our decisions may be clear, vague or unconscious.  They depend on our biases and beliefs peculiar to our individual experience that have been derived from the whole of our extensive world to which Whitehead gives the name, “the extensive continuum.”  In this way we breathe life and order into our prehensions of Huck Finn’s question, a Euclidean theorem or a recurring dream of a strange city in which we attempt to find our way.

Definition of the Extensive Continuum   

Whitehead’s definition of the extensive continuum is that it is merely the potentiality for division. The realization of an actual entity-the intelligent “Greek” profile of Athena or the fatting up of Miss Watson- effects this division. The objectification of the contemporary world via actual entities merely expresses the world in terms of its potentiality for subdivision in terms of the perspectives that any such subdivision brings into real effectiveness.

In the phrase, “Why can’t Miss Watson fat up?” the reader organizes suggested actual entities arising from the sequence of the words “cant,” “fat,” “up” and “Miss Watson” into real effectiveness. With the becoming of an actual entity, what was a potential in the continuum of space-time becomes actual. Whitehead allows that, for each concrescence, a limited or “regional” standpoint obtains. One’s sense of a locus or period  in space-time, such as an American culture that can respond  to and  understand Huck Finn and his language, would be an example.

The Extensive Continuum as a Symbolic Form

The extensive continuum is necessary to our understanding of the associations, linkages and overlappings among actual entities by means of which we describe the world. The continuum itself does not utilize shapes, dimensions or measurability. Whitehead shows that these properties are contingent on the structuring of events. For instance, the cognizance of spatiality is available only to high-grade organisms. Human concepts of space depend on an underpinning of already harmonized notions developed from the human experience of events, as when a baby learns not to reach for the moon- an experience that subsumes what the body-mind has learned so that it can later be reconstituted in the mode of non-sensuous perception and become referent to a variety of occasions.




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