The concept of the virtual in process philosophy

Over February and March 2025 I wrote four ‘Stackposts exploring the concept of the virtual in process philosophy. This followed a similar format to ones I’d written on posthumanism, post-professionalism, and process philosophy itself. As with those editions, I’ve collated all four articles here into one compendium for ease of reading.

I’ve removed all of the decorative images and assimilated the references into one long list at the foot of the article.

To cite: Nicholls. D.A. (2025). The concept of the virtual in process philosophy. ParaDoxa. https://doi.org/10.14426/020425

Part 1 - Virtual thinking

As some of you know, I’m in the midst of writing a new book that I hope one day will offer a new way to think of the physical therapies.

I’ve been deep in the weeds researching this for more than eight years now, and it’s slow going. I do love this long form process though; it can be like a slow walk in the forest at times, at other times as thrilling as turning the last page of a thriller to find out who really hid the body in the basement.

Naturally, the book will draw heavily on process philosophy, so what concepts like the ‘physical’ and ‘therapy’ even mean will need to be established early on.

But perhaps one of the central concepts in the book will be the idea of ‘the virtual’. This is really important because in all process philosophies there’s enormous space given to this concept.

The problem is I’ve never really found a good way to talk about it. (As will become clear shortly!)

The virtual means different things for different process philosophers. Deleuze and Guattari, Kleinherenbrink, Lapoujade, Bergson, Whitehead, Harman, and a host of other process philosophers all differ in the power and meaning they ascribe to it, But most agree that it is a non-actualised, un-realised ‘zone’ that has no spatial coordinates and has no ‘extension’ (the Cartesian word for something that has shape and form).

Crucially, it’s also not transcendent, meaning that it’s not a term used to describe a heavenly realm or spirit world ruled over by gods inaccessible to man (sic). Nor is it an idealised version of reality, as in Plato’s forms. It’s not a cluster of universal laws, like the 'laws of nature’. Nor is it the Freudian unconscious.

On the other hand, it is common to all things, forms, matter, objects, thoughts, events, and processes, and no actual occurrence of anything can exist without it.

In Deleuze’s early writings especially Difference and Repetition, the virtual is described as composing reality whilst also containing all possible realities.

And its this mind-bending idea that something that doesn’t ‘exist’ can contain everything whilst also making everything that causes so much consternation.

And yet, in some ways, it’s so commonplace it’s ridiculous. When you bake a cake, for instance, you’re drawing on the idea of a cake when you make it. By making the cake you don’t withdraw all forms of cake from the world leaving nothing for anyone else; the idea of cake is still there. So there’s some form of virtual cake to which we all refer that can never be exhausted no matter how many you make. (In fact the more cakes you make, the bigger the virtual world of cakiness becomes.)

But perhaps this example is too simplistic?

Deleuze and Whitehead both use the analogy of oogenesis in which an egg becomes a living organism as an example of the virtual. Everything is held in the egg, and yet nothing is yet realised.

The problem with this image, though, is that it can encourage people to think that the structure of the future organism is already laid down in the egg and that the future is, in some ways, foretold. This is absolutely not what Deleuze and Whitehead would want us to think.

Some people have used mathematics as an aid to understanding the virtual. For example, it’s very hard for us to find words to express either the concept of infinity or the number zero, and yet we know both are real. But how can zero be real? Surely zero means nothing? But how can nothing be something? (Sartre, of course, made a very unhealthy career out of this question.)

This gets closer to the kind of abstraction you need to understand the virtual. But for me, it can still be too abstract.

One might think of the virtual as a form of ‘potential’ energy, waiting to be converted into kinetic energy and movement. But Deleuze is adamant that ideas of potential already pre-supposes a set of future possibles, and so again limits what might become.

The biggest problem, I think, is that the virtual has no spatial coordinates, so it can’t be thought of as some kind of empty warehouse waiting to be filled with actual things and events. On the contrary, the virtual is radically full; ‘it possesses a full reality by itself’ (Deleuze 1993, p.211).

So why bother with the virtual?

It would be perfectly reasonable at this point to ask why we need to even bother with a concept like the virtual. Isn’t it just making things overly complicated?

My answer would be that if you’re trying to think philosophically about how the universe works, and you’ve turned to process philosophy, at some point you’ll need to ask what a thing ‘is’. Remember that things, matter and objects in process philosophy are very different to things in the classical substance philosophies.

But even classical Western philosophies accept that there’s more to things than meets the eye; there’s always something that exceeds our ability to know a thing entirely. An object is never ‘exhausted’ by our perception of it.

It’s why Kant differentiated the thing ‘in itself’ (noumena) from the thing as we encounter it (phenomena).

And the fundamentally excessive, elementally inaccessible nature of things is exactly why we go to such lengths in quantitative and qualitative research to prove our observations, because we know they will always miss something.

In normal life, what this means is that if I buy a car or think about my breakfast, I experience it, but something of the car and breakfast remain — a virtual car/breakfast if you will. I do not remove the car or breakfast from the world, ending everyone’s possible access.

Something of ‘car’ and ‘thought of breakfast’ remains and my specific encounter gets added somewhere, somehow to the universe.

This is why the universe grows ever larger, not smaller. So, no virtual, no life.

Some virtual car/thought must lie both in the past (having been encountered) but also retains some presence in the present, so that there are more cars/thoughts about breakfast for you to encounter next time.

Philosophers have tried for thousands of years to explain how the actual car/breakfast thought differs from the virtual. There are realist, idealist, constructivist, postmodern, existential, pragmatic and all sorts of other explanations offered, and they all differ.

But they do all agree that there can be no comprehensive metaphysics of life without a solution to the problem of how to explain the virtual.

For its part, much of the frustration many people feel with process philosophy is with the way a lot of these concepts are framed. The language is almost always opaque and perplexing.

But these philosophers are writing about ideas that, they argue, defy traditional logics and easy analogy. So inevitably there’s more James Joyce than Roger Hargreaves about them.

Still, it would be nice if it were just a little bit easier!

I’d be really interested to hear how some of you build mental pictures of the virtual in your work. If you’ve got any suggestions for ways you understand the virtual, I’d love to hear them.

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Part 2 - Beauty lives though lilies die

Reflections on the past, present and future in process philosophy

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the meaning of the virtual in process philosophy, and in the comments tried to answer Julian Resch’s lovely provocations. To summarise, I argued that the virtual:

• Is completely real, but not actualised (i.e. it takes no form, so is not ‘extended’, as Descartes would say);

• Does not reside in the mind as a form of a Freudian ‘unconscious’; not least because it is present in every occasion or event throughout the cosmos. (I’ll return to the idea of memories and the unconscious below);

• Isn't a metaphor for anything, nor is it symbolic or the representation of something. Entities can exist without metaphors, symbols and representations, but they can't exist without the virtual;

• Is inaccessible, meaning that the full extent of what a occasion/event can do can never be fully known or exhausted.

This last idea is particularly interesting because it dovetails so nicely with the idea of time in process philosophy. And if there is one sentinel subject that marks process philosophy apart from most others, it is its radical ideas about time.

The future redux

In the West, our concept of time draws heavily on Enlightenment ideas about linear, measurable, predictable progress. So time is often thought of as a straight line running from the past, through the present, and into the future.

But this idea causes all sorts of problems.

To take just one example, what does the past mean exactly in the idea of linear, chronological time? What are memories?

Clearly memories can’t be formed before the event. Nor in the future, before the event itself has happened. So memories must be produced in the precise moment of the event itself. But in linear time, this precise moment is the present. So are memories — all memories — folded into the present? In which case, what’s the difference between past and present?

What advocates of linear time need, if they’re going to differentiate the past from the present, is some place to ‘send’ memories. I don’t mean a part of the brain, cell nucleus or computer hard drive, but a place marked out in time that is neither now or a time yet to come.

But events in the present can’t be sent ‘back’ in linear time, because that would require time’s arrow to flow backwards, embedding memories in a past that depends on a future present that doesn’t yet exist. This might work in the movies, but you would need more than a flux capacitor to make that possible.

The matter becomes even more perplexing when we think about the future.

In linear time, the future is the next moment into which the present passes. But is the present really ‘passing’ into the future, or is one ‘past’ present merely manifesting as a new alternative present? In which case, this isn’t really the future, but just an endless succession of serial ‘nows’.

And there’s another problem, because if the previous present is now giving way to the new present, what role does the future play? Why do we need the future ontologically at all? What function does it serve in linear time?

Put another way, what can the concept of the future tell us about why ‘the new’ brings us something and not nothing. In linear time, why we have continuity between successive presents and not just random chaos? What shapes what the present becomes?

The only real answer that substance philosophers have offered to explain the way the present is ‘filled up’ by a future yet to come is to turn to transcendentalism. Here some ‘force’ (God, mother nature, universal scientific laws, fate, etc.) sits outside of time itself, and speaks down to the present and helps it shape how it passes.

There are many problems with this, not least the fact that this kind of transcendentalism depends on a force that is completely abstract and hypothetical operating outside of time and space; governing from ‘the beyond’ so to speak.

It also suggests that the future is not radically open, but is, in some ways, limited by the powers that the transcendental force bestows upon us. Nothing in the present can evict this force and we would be consigned to a future that is little more than a series of variations on the present.

The existence of this idea of transcendentalism explains in large part why Western science pays so much attention to prediction, because prediction is the tool we use to guess what this transcendental force is likely to do. Again, this is an image of a future that is not radically open, but is set out like a vast cosmic buffet: pre-planned, orderly and limited.

So here then we have a powerful and almost universal understanding of time that a) can’t explain where memories go, b) requires time travel to create the past, and c) an image of a future that is indistinguishable from the present and relies on God or science to explain why things happen in the world.

Now, on a practical level, when everything we know operates along clock time, it makes sense to know that you’re at the dentist at 4. But if you want to do more than this — if you’re trying to understand philosophically why things happen the way they do in the world, for example — you will soon come up against some major roadblocks with modern Western concepts of time.

So what’s the alternative?

Naturally, the answer to this is radical and not easy to convey in a short post. But this is where we need the idea of the virtual.

The first thing to do is to put aside any mental constructs of time as a line running from the past to the future. Time is not an arrow. To think of it as an arrow is to confuse time with space. When we plot time along a line or measure time in milliseconds/seconds/hours, we mistakenly give each moment real estate that it doesn’t really have.

We do the same thing when we talk about the past behind us and the future in front. We create a mental picture that may be easy to convey, but it’s wrong and misleading. The past is not yesterday and there is no tomorrow.

One of the best ways to think about time in process philosophy is to first of all to stop calling it ‘time’. This has too many associations with ticking clocks and The History Channel. Bergson’s word duration (durée) is better. It implies constant movement and flow and gets us away from the image of points along a line.

The next thing is to think about is the past and the future as ‘two perfectly symmetrical jets, one of which falls back towards the past while the other springs forward towards the future’ (Bergson 1929, p.160).

So rather than thinking about the past and the future as lying behind and in front, think of them as co-existing with the present.

The virtual past and future are absolutely, completely real, but they have no actual manifestation. Only the present is actualised.

What differentiates the past and the future is that the past is full; completely stuffed with intensities that are selected and gathered together (contracted, to use the Deleuzian word) by the present to form self-stabilising formations. (Remember, this is as true for human experiences as it is for everything else in the cosmos.)

The future is the exact opposite. Where the past is full, the future is radically empty. It has no form, yet we know it exists. Most importantly, it has no guiding hand wafting miasmas of influence over it from ‘the outside’, and it bears absolutely no relation to the present or the past. It is not connected in any way.

The future cannot be connected to the past or the present because there has to be a way to explain how it endures. If a present could consume the future entire, then this would end any possibility of a future, and the universe would end in an instant. So something must remain beyond the reach of any and all presents. Some inaccessible, untouchable and virtual future, devoid of all interest and influence must survive for us to even have a future.

So the virtual is present in all durations: past, present and future.

I haven’t spoken about the present here and perhaps I’ll save that for another post. There’s probably more than enough here to chew over.

So I suppose my main points are these:

1. There are significant problems with our classical Newtonian concept of time — something that’s being increasingly borne out in quantum physics — and these limitations make it hard to think of the real experience of duration for all things;

2. There are alternatives, and the process philosophies of Bergson, Deleuze, Whitehead and others offer, for me, the most compelling arguments.

*The title of this post comes from the poem The Golden Journey To Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker: “We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage | And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die, | We Poets of the proud old lineage | Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why, - …” Link

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Part 3 - Sense and nonsense

After a brief detour into practice last week, I’m returning today to the complicated concept of ‘the virtual’ in process philosophy.

In the first post in the series, I tried to explain all of the things the virtual wasn’t. For instance, you can’t think of the virtual as a transcendental realm ‘beyond’ this world, nor as a metaphor or model of the unconscious. It’s not some kind of ‘warehouse’ where real things are stored, nor is it pure potential.

It is however ubiquitous, real, more than meets the eye, and profoundly common.

The virtual is also non-spatial. It has no ‘extension’, meaning it takes no shape or form. It is temporal, or, more accurately, durational, and makes us completely rethink the ideas of the past, present and future; an aspect I explored in more depth in the second post in the series.

Now, in this post I want to tackle the relationship between the virtual and the concept of sense.

One of the most beguiling features of process philosophy is how every concept seems to run into every other. Like a tie-dyed shirt; one colour bleeds into everything else.

But of course, process philosophy has to do this, because it is the antithesis of a substance philosophy that works so hard to create clear boundaries between things. Process philosophy wants everything to be interstitial. And so it is with the ideas of sense, nonsense and the virtual.

When we use the word sense it can mean a number of things. It can denote, manifest and signify something. But we always think of it as a sort of ground to the meaning we give to things. And in humans, sense is most often conveyed through language, although non-verbal communication can convey sense, too.

A century ago though, linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure showed that sense was conveyed as much by what things were not — their negative space, if you will — as what they seemingly were. Derrida’s later work on deconstruction developed this idea further.

What these early post-structuralists showed is that there is always something that escapes the ground of sense; something that exceeds literal translation.

Writers like Lewis Carroll — much beloved of Deleuze — make heavy use of this ‘inexpressible outside’ of language, inventing portmanteau words that seem somehow to convey meaning without having any anchor in sense. Words like slithy (from lithe and slimy), chortle (chuckle and snort), and mimsy (miserable and flimsy) force us to go beneath literal meaning-making and search for the nonsense in sense.¹

In Logic of Sense (Deleuze 1969), Deleuze was interested to see what led sense to its limit; what stripped language of its inherited meaning, and allowed a glimpse into nothing but sense.

Deleuze was interested to find the flip side of sense; the untethered, non-spatial movement that has no form, no extension, and yet makes sense possible.

We know that such a form of nonsense exists because there is always something inexpressible that exceeds sense. But crucially, what Deleuze argued was that we don’t derive nonsense from sense — we don’t produce non-meaning in the act of ascribing meaning to things — rather, nonsense precedes sense. Nonsense is the engine, the machine that makes all thought possible.

Now, this bears repeating, but I’m not talking about thought in the psychological sense here, but rather a form of thought — or ‘feeling’ as Whitehead preferred — that is common to all occasions, events and things throughout the cosmos. So, cushions, hopes and dreams and forest fires all ‘think’ ontologically in the same way as we do (although the way we think is unique to us).

So, for Deleuze, nonsense is not some kind of ghostly residue of sense-making, it is radically full. Nonsense is the entire universe of possible meaning from which sense derives. Nonsense is the real, virtual world from which bodies and qualities are formed.

Here we see a tie-back to the last post and the idea of ‘the past’ in process philosophy. The past is not a place where memories go, but rather a flow that exists like one of two jets flying alongside the present. Where the future remains always radically empty, the past (nonsense) is completely stuffed with life, from which the present (sense) draws.

Nonsense is the Body-without-Organs, deterritorialisation, smooth space, the plane of consistency, and what Bergson called intuition.

Crucially, whenever nonsense produces sense, it bequeaths not only the possibility of life to sense, but also the absolute possibility of death. Death haunts every act of creation, and the risk that sense is still-born at the moment of its creation underpins the idea of difference and creative evolution.

Deleuze argues that nonsense is the genetic centre and quasi-cause of sense. This is an odd term, but what Deleuze means to show is that nonsense and the virtual are always inaccessible to the parts of an entity that enter into relations with other things. The ground of sense can never fully access ungrounded nonsense, although everything ‘has a shot’ (Kleinherenbrink 2018).

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Part 4 - What did the virtual ever do for us?

This is the fourth in my series on the process philosophy concept of the virtual (you can find parts 1, 2 and 3 here). In this final piece I want to tackle why the concept of the virtual is so important and what it gives us.

In many ways the virtual is the backbone of process philosophy. It’s the bass player in the band, the negative space around the image, the interstitial space that cushions the cells.

It’s important firstly because it frees us up from conventional modes of thought. Where Western science believes in the conquest of universal truths, process philosophy says that every event or occasion has a virtual aspect that can never be fully grasped; that science is hubris and the real never resides in the universal. It is the zero to science’s number one.

The virtual also allows us to shed the Kantian idealism that has dominated the qualitative world for 200 years. Where idealism says that all we can know is filtered through our human subjective experience, process philosophy asserts that contemplation is an act of feeling (Whitehead) common to all events and occasions throughout the cosmos, no matter how grand or nondescript those are.

The virtual also rids us of our need to explain the world by referencing a second, remote, inaccessible realm beyond what is immanent to us. There is no need for a transcendental ‘beyond’; everything events and occasions need is already present, already here.

What then does the virtual give us, then?

There are a number of different forms of the virtual in process philosophy, including Bergson’s élan vital, Deleuze’s virtual real, Harman’s sensual objects and qualities, Whitehead’s eternal and perished objects, and Spinoza’s conatus, and each must be understood within each author’s broader philosophy. But some commonalities are clear, and these show just how profound the idea of the virtual really is.

Firstly, the virtual is the main way process philosophy explains time without needing to spatialise, objectify or instrumentalise it. Much of our world may still run on somewhat arcane notions of Newtonian linear time, but process philosophy rejects such abstract ideas.

In the second post in this short series I talked about how the past, present and future are radically different in process philosophy. Process philosophy, in this respect, is a lot closer to quantum gravity and many Indigenous beliefs about time.

So, to begin with, process philosophy gives us an radically different and arguably far more real idea of what time is and isn’t.

Secondly, the virtual rids us of the need to spatialise everything, from fixed, stable and static objects (that sit patiently waiting for some external force to move them), to physical space itself.

In process philosophy, acts of grounding, sedimentation, concrescence, thickening or condensation are only possible because of a parallel ungrounding and deterritorialisation. In Deleuze, for instance, every striated space is accompanied by smooth space. Every local compression or centripetal force (Nail) is accompanied by a relaxation or centrifugal movement somewhere else. Some groundings are trivial, others profound, but even the most trivial movement pulls on threads of duration that affect even the most distant occasion. Nothing is inconsequential.

There is no fixed space, then. Every ‘here’ also comes with a ‘there’. Every actual ‘now’ has a virtual past folded into it. This is never just this.

It follows in process philosophy then that nothing is ever singular. There is no singular apple, tree, woman, thought, or solitary walk in the woods. Everything is always multitudes. So there are no singular, real, identifiable objects or things in the world.

Not because there is nothing fundamentally real, or because the ‘real’ is a projection of our perceptions, but because everything happening in the universe is a messy mesh of overlapping flows and virtual forces occasionally produce, like fruiting bodies on fungi, forms that others entities can prehend.

Finally, the virtual is always ‘anterior’ to the event; it is a drive, a push, a ‘will’ (Nietzsche) that gives impetus for creative exploration (creative evolution in Bergson), rather than ‘pulling’ events from the future.

Transcendentalism and teleology are both rejected by process philosophy because they presume some kind of already established mystical future that looks back over its shoulder and pulls the present into it like a dog on a leash.

The virtual is, instead, a kind of desire. But Deleuze repeatedly argued against an understanding of desire as ‘lack’. Instead, desire, or what Bergson called élan vital, resides in the virtual and impels events forward into a radically empty future.

Without the virtual then, there really would be no process philosophy.

The virtual, then, gives us a different understanding of time, space, movement and desire, but it’s also an elusive concept that is often hard to pin down.

Below are some readings I think might help if you’d like to know more about the virtual and how it’s thought about in process philosophy.

What’s next? I’m going to start a new short series in the next few weeks tackling another strange idea: furniture therapy.

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References and suggested readings

Bergson, H. (1911). Matter and Memory (N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, Trans.) Allen & Unwin.

Bergson, H. (1911). Creative Evolution (A. Mitchell, Trans.). Macmillan.

Bergson, H. (1929). Mind-Energy (H. Wildon Carr, Trans.). Greenwood Press.

DeLanda, M., & Harman, G. (2017). The Rise of Realism. John Wiley & Sons.

Deleuze, G. (1969). The Logic of Sense. Columbia University Press.

Deleuze, G. (1993). Difference and repetition. Columbia University Press.

Harman, G. (2011). The quadruple object. Zero Books.

Kleinherenbrink, A. (2018). Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze’s Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press.

Whitehead, A. N. (1978). Process and reality. Free Press.

1. A number of other authors used language techniques like this in their writing, and they provide some great methodological pointers for anyone wanting to break out of more traditional forms of thinking and practice. James Joyce initially coined the word quark, for instance, which was then taken up by physicists, and Edward Lear wrote about ‘runcible’ spoons in The owl and the pussy-cat. No-one yet knows what a runcible spoon is. But that hardly seems to matter.