Whitehead's Asymmetry: Internal Relations to the Past, External Relations to the Future

Whitehead's temporalization of the internal/external relations distinction represents one of the most consequential moves in twentieth-century metaphysics. The analytic tradition, following Russell, demanded external relations to preserve the independence of terms and the possibility of analysis. Bradley's idealism countered that all relations are internal, though his deeper argument was that the very concept of relation generates an infinite regress that violates non-contradiction. Whitehead sidesteps this impasse by introducing temporal asymmetry: every actual entity is internally related to its settled past — it prehends and literally incorporates antecedent actualities — while remaining externally related to its future, the domain of real potentiality. This asymmetry is not incidental but architectonic; it grounds the irreversibility of process and the reality of novelty.

The locus where internal and external relations converge is concrescence — the self-constituting process of an Actual Occasion. During concrescence, the entity is not yet spatiotemporally located, not yet subject to the laws of identity and non-contradiction that govern determinate beings. It is resolving the multiplicity of its prehensions — feelings inherited from the entire settled world — into a novel unity of experience. Concrescence is thus the metaphysical ground of decision, where "decision" carries its etymological weight of cutting off alternatives.

This framework redefines interiority. Soul or subjectivity is neither Cartesian substance independent of relations nor Hegelian spirit constituted entirely by social and logical mediation. It is the nexus where the weight of inherited actuality meets the lure of unrealized possibility — and the creative unification of these is inherently prior to propositional description, since propositions presuppose the determinate entities that concrescence produces.