“This misapprehension is promoted by the neglect of the principle that, so far as the physical relations are concerned, contemporary events happen in causal independence of each other.” (Chap.II. sec.1 Process and Reality).
This might be what Plotinus called the Plenum or Sankara ‘The Field’ (B.G.Bh ch.13). Here is the pure satkaryavada of the non-difference of cause and effect. Here suspended in Being, as it were, is the totality of existence. The sense of contingency as a rational demand is strong as I dwell on this profound insight of Whitehead’s.
Marc Pugliese’s interesting paper on Sankara and Whitehead stresses the immanence of the cause in the effect held by both of them.
2 comments:
There is a copy of Process and Reality that has been on my shelves for many years unread, but which I mean to get to.
A professor I knew, a Hegelian (more or less), said that Whitehead wrote as if you put a bunch of Leibniz's monads in a kaleidoscope, shook them up, and then peered in at them.
Professor Joad thought there were two kinds of obscurity, the expression of obscurity and obscurity of expression. “The first is pardonable, perhaps inevitable." Whitehead he suspected was more obscure than was strictly demanded by his excogitations.
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