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Well, I understand ontology in the traditional, (not Heideggerian), sense to involve an architecture of categories stipulating the various species of beings to be found in the world, as well as, a concern with "foundations", as specifying the limits of beings and their priorities, establishing a rank order grounded in the dependencies of the having-been, in recursion to an a priori "necessity". You won't exactly find that in Whitehead, but instead there is a concentrated, but highly generalized analysis of process, which can be variously configured to try to "capture" the "identities" and happenings of real phenomena.

Of course, Whitehead recognizes that, say, there are no biological organisms without physical processes of matter and energy and there are no neural processes without physiological bodies. But he's not really interested in establishing such priorities, but rather he's focused on the coeval contributions that the various beings at their various levels make to the real happenings in the world. And, as I think I made plain, he's both criticizing the notion of unchanging "eternal" essences, in favor of an account of the transformations wrought by real processes, of "change in the essence",- (Adorno uses the Aristotle phrase "metabasis in allo genos" to indicate the same theme, though, of course, the phrase means something different in Aristotle),- and a reconfiguring the sense of "having-been" in terms of its contribution to the evolution of further novelty.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Whitehead, at least on the level of sensibility, is that, though he's reacting against the depersonalizing disturbance of the reductively materialistic naturalism that was first fully established by Newtonian mechanics, he does so in terms fully conversant with and adequate to naturalism, without any component of irrationalistic Romantic reaction, or, arguably, any impulse toward re-mythification, (though a Wordsworthian sensibility, a sense of immersion in the experience of the natural world, is as basic to his inspiration as any scientific or philosophical source).

I'll make a few comments on Bergson, as reported in the Borradori. The obvious weakness of Bergson is his concept,- (or is it "method"?),- of intuition based on introspection. That smells of rank subjectivism. (Though Whitehead makes a fundamental appeal to experience, one of his basic points is that any experiencing being is already a part of the experienced world. If 20th century philosophy is characterized in considerable part by a crisis in the subjectivist turn in modern philosophy, that is a sober, yet matter-of-fact response.) And though Bergson is basically correct about spacialized time,- the Newtonian definition of time as the measure of motion through space, which is already found in Aristotle as "the number of movement through change in place", being actually a definition of its measurement, thereby attempting to "objectify" it, in place of an analysis of its experience,- he seems to deploy that point to "legitimate" deficiently an abstract counter-position.

In particular, it's doubtful that time can be spoken of as, of itself, a transformative agency, apart from the causal or communicative processes that occur with it. (Communicative processes do not directly cause anything, but rather bring about modal shifts in relations between organisms; that is, in addition to any information exchanged, they alter "meanings" and only thereby impact any intervention into causal states-of-affairs.) To lay claim to a "tendential model", which somehow supervenes on the course of events, begs the question of what such a tendency is supposed to add on. (And doesn't the "elan vital" mirror the vitalism of the contemporary German biologists, which, inspite of the crude functionalism of their Darwinian opponents, was legitimately defeated in scientific debates?)

If the appeal is to an immersion in experience, as at once a contact with the pre-rational given and a becoming other, one can ask what gives that experience its correlation with the (external) world. Still less plausible is the projection of such experience onto a "cosmic" process as a whole. Unless some reflective "second sight" is cast upon such experience, separating out the descriptive from the explanatory, it smacks of either mysticism or myth.

But my biggest objection is the question of whether the notion of duration can really capture (the experience of) time and form a adequate notion of temporality, or rather whether time itself does not require articulation, so as to be at all registered. That latter prospect is easy enough to show, in terms of internal time consciousness, which is itself an effect of the condition of language, and, via the deictic coordination of its expressions, constitutes historical time and historicity.

And is physical time at all conceivable or physically registerable without the cross-section of events? (At this point, one could ask whether the notion of physical time could having any meaning apart from its measurement). If the notion of duration is to reveal differences, can that really be separated from the impact of events that make for those differences? I don't think that it is illegitimate to inquire into the pre-rational roots of meaning in the domain of analog thinking and experience. That, after all, is part of the source of philosophical thinking. (And perhaps still more important than any nourishing of the understanding of being that that domain might provide, relational signals occur precisely in that dimension.) But such inquiry can not prove fruitful without the elaboration of rational means for their recuperation.

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