Because of this mutual co-constitution, “you cannot abstract the universe from any entity.so as to consider that entity in complete isolation.In a sense, every entity pervades the whole world” (PR, p. Thus, “actual entities involve each other by reason of their prehensions of each other” (PR, p. Whitehead calls the process of unification a concrescence of prehensions, where prehensions are the ways in which other entities are taken in by, and felt within the entity, and where the concrescence is the creative process of pulling together these diverse prehensions of other actual entities into a novel, organic unity. This process of becoming is a creative synthesis into one actual entity of its many relations to other actual entities. An actual entity is not an inert and permanent substance, but a relational process of becoming: “ how and actual entity becomes constitutes what that actual entity is.Its ‘being’ is constituted by its ‘becoming’” (PR, p. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real” (PR, p. These actual entities “are the final real things of which the world is made up. Today, Whitehead’s philosophy is often referred to as process philosophy.Īccording to Whitehead, “the actual world is a process, and.the process is the becoming of actual entities” (PR, p. In 1924 at the age of 63, Whitehead accepted a position at Harvard University, where he focused on the development of his metaphysical system, which he called the philosophy of organism. During the period from 1910 to 1924 Whitehead did work in the philosophy of science at the University of London and the Imperial College of Science and Technology. From 1900 to 1911 in Cambridge he collaborated with his former pupil Bertrand Russell on their Principia Mathematica, which attempted to deduce all of mathematics from strictly logical foundations. Before discussing the similarities between Whitehead’s philosophy and Buddhist philosophy, however, I will briefly introduce these philosophies separately.Īlfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was a mathematician who later turned to philosophy. Although I wanted to see in what ways these philosophies might converge, at the same time I felt it was important to honor their differences, and acknowledge that some of their similarities might be only superficial resemblances. Second, after noticing a few intriguing similarities between Whitehead’s philosophy and Buddhist philosophy, I felt drawn to see what other similarities there may be, and to what extent these similarities stand up under closer scrutiny. First, since I had some familiarity with Buddhist philosophy, I felt that relating Whitehead’s philosophy to this existing knowledge and experience would be an effective way to integrate it into my understanding. There were two main reasons why I selected Buddhist philosophy as a way of engaging Whitehead’s philosophy more deeply. This paper represents my individual efforts to understand Whitehead’s philosophy more deeply by relating it to Mahayana Buddhist philosophy. The paper concludes with a discussion of an important distinguishing feature of Buddhist philosophy, namely, its dialectical method of criticism.Īlfred North Whitehead’s major philosophical work, Process and Reality, presents a complex and original metaphysical framework which is initially quite challenging to understand. The primary areas of convergence are (1) impermanence and process as fundamental aspects of reality, (2) the emptiness and lack of substance of things, (3) the relational and dependent nature of things, (4) the notion of ignorance and mistaken perception, (5) the possibility of freedom from ignorance and mistaken perception, (6) the emphasis on subjective and experiential aspects of reality, and (7) the fundamental limitations of language and philosophical systems in characterizing reality. After briefly introducing the philosophies of Whitehead and Buddhism, some similarities between them are examined. Revised and edited for the web March 2004ĪBSTRACT: Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy is compared with Mahayana Buddhist philosophy.
Process and Emptiness: A Comparison of Whitehead and BuddhismĪ Comparison of Whitehead’s Process Philosophy and
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