Sarkar, Anil Kumar. Whitehead’s Four Principles from West-East Perspectives: Ways and Prospects of Process Philosophy, Second Edition. Hayward, CA: Sarkar Publications, 1985 [1974]
Abstract
Both before and after the second world war,
Alfred North Whitehead had been studied mostly from the Western
scientific and philosophic standpoints. In this edition, this writer
surveys the rapid increase in Whiteheadian studies, from the Western
cultural heritage and from a standpoint of Asian-Buddhist studies.
Hence he feels a great need for Whiteheadian studies from an advanced
intercultural perspective. The world is heading toward a process of
Star Wars between two Super Powers, but they are not yet ready for a
preventive measure by detaching oneself from one's ideology. Whitehead,
as a profound scientist and philosopher of this century, in the line of
Einstein, Jeans, Eddington, Russell, Bradley, Bergson Peirce, James,
Dewey, and Santayana, was against the abstract ideology. He, with
others of his line, lifted the human mind from its attachment to
abstract ideas, and focused it on a post-intellectual, non-discursive,
meditative process beyond specific ideas - the logic, epistemology, and
psychology that governed the abstract processes of idealism, empiricism
and theism of early Western thought to the stage of Hegel and
Karl Marx. Whitehead, through his novel philosophic method of General
Ideas, confronted the perceptual universe from the mind of a living
human organism, which is a meeting point of two Natures - the
non-sensuous Nature as past and the sensuous and progressively
intellectual Nature as emergent and prospective, in many-dimensional
insightful spheres. Whitehead's interest was in pursuing the
non-discursive meditative way of Peace of the Buddha and his followers.
The Peace is a pathway to non-discursive solitude which closes up the
gulf that divides the Western from the non-Western Asian thought. In a
specially formulated Preface, this second edition brings out
Whitehead's insightful internationalist attitude, without any
alteration of the materials of the previous edition. It gives an
emphasis on Whitehead's pursuit towards Peace from a psycho-cosmic
perspective. To modernize Whitehead's thought further, this writer
refers to several of his research works, to acquaint the readers of a
possible extension of Whiteheadian studies by an insightful application
of Whiteheadian principles.