Reading 'Process and Reality' (in my shed)

 

Well then have I definitively given up on ‘Being and Time’? Yes.  My feeling was that the trek was not worth the trudge.  Now I have to look for a ‘hard’ book to read, a challenge that might be worth the slog.  I have lit on ‘Process and Reality’ by A.N. Whitehead.  Published in 1929 based on the Gifford Lectures of ‘27 and ‘28.  I’ve looked at it before on several occasions and have a general idea of the scope and ambition of what is his major work which has given rise to a school of process philosophy and theology.  One major difference between this work and B&T is that when Whitehead gives you neologisms/locutions he details precisely how this new expression serves to distinguish his thought from that which has gone before.  Thus ‘substance’ might be replaced by ‘actual entity’ and ‘universal’ by ‘eternal object’.  That that sentence under advisement.  As I go on my understanding will change.

The coherence, which the system seeks to preserve, is the discovery that the process, or concrescence, of any one actual entity involves the other actual entities among its components. In this way the obvious solidarity of the world receives its explanation.  (pg. 7 ed. Griffin and Sherburne )

He later adds that his process philosophy has a relation to Eastern thought:

In such monistic schemes, the ultimate is illegitimately allowed a final, ‘eminent’ reality, beyond that ascribed to any of its accidents. In this general position the philosophy of organism seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought. One side makes process ultimate; the other side makes fact ultimate.

Nisargadatta in answer to a question about causality responds treating the universe as a single block:

Q: As long as the mind operates, causation is a valid law.

M: Like everything mental, the so-called law of causation contradicts itself. No thing in existence has a particular cause; the entire universe contributes to the existence of even the smallest thing; nothing could be as it is without the universe being what it is. When the source and ground of everything is the only cause of everything, to speak of causality as a universal law is wrong. The universe is not bound by its content, because its potentialities are infinite; besides it is a manifestation, or expression of a principle fundamentally and totally free. (#4 I AM THAT)