Alfred North Whitehead, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The doctrine of substance — that the world contains enduring things which possess attributes and which persist through change as the same numerical individual — is the chief example of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: the mistake of treating an abstraction useful for some purposes as the concrete actual.1 Cartesian res extensa and res cogitans, Lockean primary substance, Newtonian absolute space and time, the bifurcation of nature into a perceived sense-nature and a conjectured molecular nature behind it — these are all instances of the same fallacy.
The vector character of physical inheritance, energy as the transfer of intensity from past to present, the wave-particle duality, the relational character of space-time in general relativity, the displacement of mass-energy as conserved scalar by the four-momentum of relativistic mechanics — modern physics has already done the work of replacing substance with vector.
The philosophy of organism articulates what physics has already discovered. Vacuous actuality — an actual entity without subjective form, without the appropriation of data, without any internal becoming — is incoherent: it would be an actual entity that is not actual in the way actuality has to be actual, namely as the becoming of a unity from a multiplicity.
The substance metaphysics is the long shadow of a categorial mistake whose disciplinary purpose was logical and whose extension into cosmology committed the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as starkly as any move in the history of philosophy.23
There can be no 'mere' togetherness of such abstractions. The result is that philosophical discussion is enmeshed in the fallacy of 'misplaced concreteness.Process and Reality, p. 28
We are — now approaching the limits of any reasonable certainty in our scientific knowledge; but again there is evidence that the concept may be mistaken. The mysterious quanta of energy have made their appearance, derived, as it would seem, from the recesses of protons, or of electrons. Still worse for the concept, these quanta seem to dissolve into the vibrations of light.Process and Reality, pp. 122–123
Of course, as a point of individual psychology, we get at the ideas by the rough and ready method of suppressing what appear to be irrelevant details. But when we attempt to justify this suppression of irrelevance, we find that, though there are entities left corresponding to the entities we talk about, yet these entities are of a high degree of abstraction.Science and the Modern World
One of the most-vindicated diagnostic claims of the philosophy of organism. The substance critique was already underway in the philosophy of natural science of the 1920s; the Whitehead contribution was to articulate it metaphysically and to identify the fallacy of misplaced concreteness as the systematic error. The contemporary analytic substance metaphysics (Lowe's four-category ontology 2006, Heil's substance-properties view 2003, Schaffer's monism) has reasserted substance with sophistication that distinguishes it from the Aristotelian-Cartesian target of the original critique. Whether the contemporary substance metaphysics escapes the misplaced-concreteness charge is the live question. The Latour-Stengers continental tradition has extended the bifurcation critique into actor-network theory and the modes-of-existence project; Latour's We Have Never Been Modern (1991) and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence (2013) are the most-developed extensions. Shaviro's Without Criteria (2009) develops the anti-substance metaphysics aesthetically.