for - Whitehead's philosophy - Whitehead - limitations of language - Indra's Net - Whitehead - process relational ontology

• Whitehead says that

  • philosophy is an attempt to express the infinity of the universe
    • in terms of the LIMITATIONS OF LANGUAGE

• And i think this image of the spiderweb with the dewdrops each reflecting the others is the perfect analogy for whitehead's ontology

• You may have heard of indra's net from madhyamaka buddhism
  • the idea of dependent co-origination of all things
    • that nothing has independent abiding existence
      • but is rather caught up in a network of
        • relations or
      • causes and conditions
    • and so you can't remove any of the nodes in the network without destroying the node and totally changing the rest of the network that it was embedded within
• This is the key to what a process RELATIONAL ONTOLOGY is trying to reveal to us about the nature of reality
• Dependent co-origination or you could say
  • the inter-penetration of all things
• though in Whitehead's cosmology there really are no things
  • if by thing you mean an inert isolated entity
• Whiteheads ontology is really composed of events or processes
• You could say and these processes for whitehead are
  • drops of experience
• So for whitehead, there's no node in the network of reality that is not there for itself
• It is not enjoying some degree of experience or subjectivity or has some degree or capacity for feeling