Creativity in the Topos of Nothingness 2

2. Concrescence and pratityasamutpada

Cobb wrote that while studying Buddhist writers, he came to the conclusion that "what some of them described as pratityasamutpada was what Whitehead called concrescence." ⁽⁸⁾ He agrees to the tradition of Nagarjuna as he has thought that "the distinctive attainment of Buddhist meditation is to realise that one is nothing but the many becoming one". ⁽⁹⁾ As the process of the many becoming one is called "concrescence" in Whitehead's metaphysics, we must explicate the meaning of this key word and relate it to the Buddhist standpoint of radical relationality expressed as the triad of dependent origination, non-substantiality, and emptiness.

"Concrescence" is usually interpreted etymologically as "grow together" (obsolete usage according to OED) , but this reading fails to catch its Christian-Platonistic connotations. Nicolaus Cusanus used the corresponding Latin word (concrescere, concretum) in an analogous sense to signify the dynamism of the absolute infinite which "contracts" itself to a finite concrete thing. ⁽¹⁰⁾ We may say that Whitehead and Cusanus had the same task in the common tradition of a Christian Platonism; they had to avoid the monistic fallacy of the "emanation" theory of Neo-Platonism as well as the abstract transcendentalism which lacked the concreteness of this world. In Cusanus the world is really immanent in everything in the mode of contraction or "concretum" : universum vero est in universis contracte. God is also immanent in everything of the world, but in a way radically different from that in which the world is immanent in everything. Cusanus said, "The world is neither the sun nor the moon, but it is in the sun the sun, and in the moon the moon. God, however, is neither the sun in the sun, nor the moon in the moon" . In other words, God is the principle of self-transcendence of the individual as a focus of the world. In Whitehead, God is "the principle of concretion" as well as "the organ of novelty aiming at intensification".⁽¹¹⁾ God cannot be identified with the world because the concrescing Individual(actual occasion) "prehends" God as the ground of its own subjectivity which transcends the givenness of the actual world.

In a sense Whitehead's attitude towards this world was more radically positive than Cusanus and other Christian Platonists; the dynamic rhythm of "the many becoming one and increased by one" ⁽¹²⁾ involves everything in the actual world, and every ideal entities in the realm of "eternal objects". Even God himself can not be detached from this historical process; God must give totally himself as one of actual entities according to his "superjective nature" . The immortality which Whitehead talked about is not that which the the substantial soul will enjoy in the world beyond , but the "objective immortality" in this world, which is inseparable from "the becoming and the perishing of actual entities".⁽¹³⁾ There is no actual entity that is unborn and immortal enjoying separated existence from this world. Ideas (eternal objects) are not actualities but potentialities of related and definite actual entities. The creature which becomes and perishes is objectively immortal in the Whiteheadian sense. ⁽¹⁴⁾

The radical relationality which Whitehead stressed in PR has something common with the characteristically Buddhistic notion of dependent origination identified with both non-substantiality and emptiness. In the opening part of Mulamadhyamakakarika, Nagarjuna saluted Buddha who preached the dependent origination in the eightfold negations. According to Hajime Nakamura, ⁽¹⁵⁾ the world of incessant flux was paradoxically identified with the "unborn and immortal" realm by Nagarjuna. The eightfold negation was nothing other than the transcendence of the ideal opposites through the dynamism of dependent origination. The relationality signified by "pratityasamutpada" characterizes not only samsara but also the whole reality of samsara/nirvana.