How ‘Eternity’ Got ‘Thrown Forward’ Into ‘Perishing’

Abstract

Jude Jones argues that eternity haunts Whitehead’s 1924-25 Harvard lectures, a concept which Whitehead claims is explicit in most of our mental operations. In Whitehead’s metaphysics, the entire past is, for any occasion, part of the standing condition of valuative potential out of which that occasion will emerge, the realisation of value in particular, noneternal things or processes which nonetheless have standing value as expressions of and relations to that Eternal. But perishing is its necessary mirror; the achievement of relational value requires radical finitude in the form of realised limitation by perpetual perishing in order to be real. Value and grief become two sides of the same coin, a paradox revealing the nature of ecstatic individuation.