There was a time, not so long ago, when it was almost universally believed that the myriad species of the animal and vegetable kingdoms were created in the beginning and were thereafter permanently fixed once and for all. Today it is commonplace that even the prototypical individuals of the mineral kingdom enjoyed some measure of creativity in the evolutionary advance whereby elementary particles begat the atoms that populate the periodic table and atoms begat molecules.
Begat?
Given that there was a time when electrons and protons existed, but no atoms, how else explain the coming to be of hydrogen, the simplest of atoms, consisting of one proton and one electron? We could say and then a miracle occurred. But . . .
The evolutionary explanation, with a Whiteheadian nuance, is to say that all the true individuals in nature—particles, atoms, molecules, living cells, animals, the human soul—are centers of creative experience.
The path leading from electrons and protons to atoms is a creative path that can be explained in terms of actualities themselves, in this case: electrons and protons. In short, this means that these two were not mere inert particles but throbs of adventurous actuality. It was somehow through their creative interaction, their “decision” for novelty, that a new creature, a new atomic entity, came into being. This is the first social interplay, a romance if you will, between two opposites who continue to attract each other by one of the strongest forces in the universe.
Novelty doesn’t just float in out of the blue from nowhere; it is, rather, an emergent and creative synthesis that, as Charles Hartshorne says, “feeds on its own previous products, and on nothing else whatever!”1 It is thus both creative and preservative.
The emptiness of form2 is that form reforms . . . endlesslesslessly.
Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk and writer, offers us another way of looking at this. In speaking of reality, or what is ultimately real, he says, with maybe a twinkle in his eyes:
“There is only one Unreality!”3
This idea is grounded in the intertwined Buddhist doctrines of impermanence, no-self, emptiness, and dependent origination, also sometimes called dependent co-arising or reciprocal causality.
Dependent origination means that an extensive causal network underlies the process of becoming to be of all actualities, and that momentary events rather than substances are fundamental. Event thinking replaces substance thinking, relationships replace objects, flux replaces solidity, and, even in conscious experience, there is no enduring self that exists in unbroken continuity from one moment of experience to the next. Experience, yes . . . experiencer, no.
We must resist the urge to reify.
I say becoming to be, rather than coming to be, because the latter is too static a concept to catch the perpetual flux of all reality . . . or should I say Unreality? Buddhism likes to use the rainbow as a metaphor of how “things” co-arise.
Whitehead, in conceiving his process philosophy, came to much the same conclusion, and his way of phrasing it, following Plato, is to say that it is the nature of any actuality that . . .
“it never really is.”4
This is backed up in quantum theory by the principles of complementarity (Bohr) and uncertainty (Heisenberg). There’s simply no way to pin down an elementary particle. Why? Position and velocity are mutually exclusive determinations.5
Finally, in Whitehead’s new language and “grammar” of reality, the subject is a Verb.
Notes
1. Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method, p. 8.
2. The Heart Sutra says:
Form itself is emptiness;
Emptiness itself is form.
色即是空
空即是色
“Presence” always includes the “presence of absence,” or emptiness, sunyata.
3. Matthieu Ricard & Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet, p. 167.
4. “This conception of an actual entity in the fluent world is little more than an expansion of a sentence in the Timaeus: ‘But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.’ Bergson, in his protest against ‘spatialization,’ is only echoing Plato’s phrase ‘and never really is.’” — Process and Reality, p. 82.
5. Way back in the 13th century, over 700 years ago, Dogen expressed an insight that is evocative of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:
“When one side is illumined,
the other is darkened.”
一方ヲ證スルトキハ。
一方ハクラシ。
(Ippo o shosuru toki wa,
ippo wa kurashi.)
From the “Genjokoan” fascicle of the Shobogenzo.
HyC