Studies In Comparative Philosophy

by Swami Krishnananda

God, says Whitehead, is finally responsible for the selection of specific types of eternal objects for ingression into the actual occasions and for giving the universe a specific actual character different from the many other possible ones. God is the 'principle of limitation', for He limits the actual occasions to only a few of the infinite possibilities or patterns of process that may characterise numberless universes. God transcends the universe of process, for what determines the process cannot itself be involved in the process. We cannot conceive of any reason why God should have imposed on the actual occasions a particular kind of limitation and actualised this universe rather than any other. Whitehead says that there is a directing influence immanent in an actual occasion, called by him the 'subjective aim' of the actual occasion, which makes it what it is. Whitehead is not clear about the ultimate nature of this subjective aim, though we may regard it as an expression of the impulse to advance in evolution. The Vedanta would identify this subjective aim with the aspiration of the universe to realise its perfection in the Absolute which is immanent in the actual occasions and the eternal objects. Whitehead, perhaps, would hold the same opinion, for God and the universe, according to him, are mutually immament and interpenetrative, though God stands above the universe as the principle of its limitation. God is the universal aim of the activity of the actual occasions, in whom they envisage their highest possibilities. All the values of life are recognisable in God who is the non-temporal ideal determining the actualities of the temporal realm. God does not create the universe, but makes it possible by the process of limitation, and hence He is not responsible for the evils of relative life. Evil is the result of short-sighted activity centred in selfish purposes wrenched from the universal aim.

But Whitehead does not regard his God as identical with the Absolute. God is for him a 'non-temporal accident'. If God is one of the accidents, he cannot be the cause of the accidents which constitute the temporal universe. God has to be conceived in more satisfactory forms in order that He may determine the universe. If, by the accidental God, Whitehead means a cosmic principle akin to the Ishvara of the Vedanta, who is accidental in the sense that he is relative to the constitution of the particular universe of which he is the lord, God has to presuppose a Reality which ranges beyond accident and relativity. Whitehead's God becomes a 'consequent', an effect, related to the evolving process, and so cannot be saved unless He becomes a manifestation of the Absolute which is beyond creation. This crown of all philosophy appears to be missing in Whitehead's system, though we may suppose that he would have no objection to taking it as implied.

The criticism of the commonsense view of causation advanced by Whitehead agrees with that levelled by the Vedanta against the notion of the production of an effect from a cause separated from it. The effect cannot be different from its cause, for it is not independent of what constitutes its cause. It is not identical with its cause, for, then, we would have to abandon the concept of effect and abolish causation itself from the scheme of things. But Whitehead's process does not fully solve the problem of causation, though it overcomes the shortcomings of the classical theory of the production of certain static entities from other static entities which are anticedent to the former in time. We cannot conceive of a process without spatio-temporal relations; and if space and time are not absolute, process cannot be reality. Process is the nature of the universe as presented to the observation of actual occasions which are falsely abstracted from the rest of the universe. But without this abstraction there cannot be observation or objective perception of the process. And, if the abstraction or the isolation of actual occasions from the other aspects of the universe is false, the experience of the universe as a process, too, becomes false, in which case the identification of process with reality is a falsification of reality. We never know process as what is not experienced, and the experience open to us is in terms of an abstraction of ourselves from the whole. Thus process turns out to be a relative appearance of a reality which is more fundamental. The Vedanta identifies this reality with the immutable consciousness immanent in all processes and yet transcending them. There is the procession of actual occasions because of a reality which does not move with the procession. Whitehead requires to relegate his process to phenomena, and to reconstruct his concept of reality. The process may be real to us, finite beings, but is not real in itself.

If matter and life are fundamentally one, as Whitehead holds, the whole universe gets animated with feeling and experience. We have then, it is implied, to abandon the notion of inert matter and endow the universe with a limitless life which has to be equated with its reality. This life cannot be a process, for we have seen that a process needs some other support for it to appear. Life cannot be mere vital force, for the latter is a process of organic existence. It cannot be mind, for it, again, is a process of ideas. We are forced to return to a universal being underlying even mind, whose essence is consciousness. Matter, life and mind are the different grades of the expression of the Absolute in the region of space-time. They are comprehended in its essential being where they step beyond their distinctness of structure and realise themselves in truth. The Absolute is being and knowing.

The world of physics is the body of the Virat as perceived by spatio-temporal subjects. Science cannot concern itself with the inner significance of aesthetic, ethical and religious values, because it is busy with what is observed through the senses, and not with the factors that condition all observation. The latter become the subjects for study in philosophy. Values are not in things, the things are shells that cover a living principle in them; and it is the things that engage the attention of science. Value is the effect which consciousness produces in us when it envisages objects. The universe by itself has no sympathy with values, for it works mechanically when viewed as a sense-object. This happens because in sense-experience the object is abstracted from the consciousness which informs it. Matter appears to consist merely of electrical charges and form just a kink in the continuum of space-time, because the scientist in his observations disregards the existence and constitution of his own personality. Science studies abstractions, not wholes. No wonder, it discovers a corpse instead of a living beauty. To study a piece of mineral or the leg of a frog is not to participate in the miracle of life. The meaning of existence is disclosed in ourselves, not in what we merely see. God peeps out in tiny man, and that dust of a frail body houses a Spirit which encompasses the universe. The eternal in us refuses to be neglected in our activities, and demands a careful attention by which we can listen to the voice of the highest heaven. The clatterings of the senses are silenced by the music of Divine. Science has to return to philosophy to put on life, and philosophy has to look within to gain its soul.

The unconscious prehensions of Whitehead are really the tentacles with which conscious life feels its own parts in its evolution towards Godhead. The various degrees in which consciousness reveals itself are the forms of the mutual reaction of the phenomenal subject and the object. Consciousness hides itself in matter, breathes in plants, dreams in animals and wakes up in man, though it does not become fully self-conscious even in man. This process of gradual manifestation is valid only in individual existence. In cosmic being it is all an instantaneous illumination of all grades of life. The exigencies of individual experience, however, find it indispensable to extend to the cosmic scheme the scale of the gradual rise of consciousness in different orders of being and to make the cosmos the body of God. But these are explanations of life and accounts of experience as cast in the mould of our own make-up. Reality has no degrees in itself; there are degrees only in our perception of it. Unconscious prehensions are the conscious reaches of the Absolute through the sleeping individualities of the actual occasions. Consciousness cannot rise from unconsciousness unless it is already present in the latter, though veiled. Prehensions when brought about by the sheer force of the necessity of the interdependence of aspects of existence may be unconscious, but they are not so essentially when the aspects become alive to their positions in relation to the universe.

Both for Whitehead and for the Vedanta, God is not the author of evil in creation. For Whitehead this is true because God is not the creator but the principle of limitation, who provides the conditions necessary for the manifestation of the universe. It does not mean, however, that there exists, as Whitehead supposes, any primordial material stuff independently of God, or that God is an efficient cause differentiated from a material cause. God is the efficient, instrumental, material, formal and final cause - all in one. But God appears as consciousness and also a stuff of creation when He is viewed in an empirical abstraction. The Vedanta explains the nature of the present universe as determined by the nature of the latent potencies of the unliberated individuals lying in an unconscious state at the end of the previous cycle of creation. The universe is nothing but a field of experience for the individuals that constitute it. Without the potencies of these contents, the universe is nothing. The good and the evil of life are both expressions of these potencies actualised in experience. God, therefore, has nothing to do either with good or evil. He is not grieved at our sins, nor does He rejoice over our virtues. He does not create agency or action, nor does He bring about the fruits of action. But He appears to do all these when we, as finite beings, try to understand His ways. Whitehead does not find any reason for the particular type of limitation that God has introduced into the universal scheme. The Vedanta makes out that the form of this limitation depends on the dispositions of the latent principles to be manifested in the shape of the universe. God is the light whose mere presence rouses the potencies to activity and self-evolution.