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I WOULD not be here if I did not believe the answer is emphatically Yes. If I may make some bold, sweeping generalizations, I will claim the following.
The religions and philosophies of India and China are full of profound insights badly needed in the contemporary world in both East and West. However, they had their fullest development in an age when science was not an important part of cultural and intellectual life, and technology was not highly developed. They were formulated in less continuity with mathematics than was true of Western philosophy. They do not express a refined historical consciousness.
These traditions richly contribute to the interior and daily life of many people in the East, and in recent decades they have attracted much appreciative attention in the West as well. But beyond the very personal sphere, they have more ambiguous effects. For example, they continue to inform much of the attitude toward political authority. Having developed in a context where authority was concentrated at the top, they do little to undergird a more democratic spirit.They assume a traditional society, and do not respond directly to the problems of a modern one. In short, despite the great potential of traditional Asian thought, outside the realm of daily life and religion, its relevance to contemporary problems has not been adequately articulated.
Whitehead’s thought developed in close relation to science and mathematics and in the context of modern social and political problems. Precisely in that context he came to a view of reality that has remarkable points of contact with traditional Indian and Chinese ideas. His process thought can be greatly enriched by assimilating the wisdom accumulated in those traditions over the millennia. It can also function as a bridge, expanding the application of those ideas and relating them to the issues of our time.
Now consider what is happening in the West.
Western philosophy as a whole has run dry. The Kantian tradition that has dominated the European mind for two centuries has contributed meanings, but it fails to provide us with a context for private or public life. Deconstructive postmodernism tends toward nihilism whether its practitioners want to go there or not. Most philosophers of science provide little help to scientists themselves as they struggle to make sense of the strange phenomena they encounter. A number of philosophers, such as Richard Rorty, have proclaimed the end of the philosophic tradition.
At the deepest level, the problem with Western philosophy is that it has not freed itself from the domination of substance categories. Of course, most philosophers are aware of the difficulties with the idea of substance, and they rarely affirm the reality of substances directly. But because they reject the discipline of metaphysics, they have no way of replacing the substance categories that pervade our Indo-European languages with alternative ways of thinking. This leaves substance intact in the background of their thought.
The same is true for the sciences. Physicists know that traditional categories based on substance thought have broken down. For example, the ether they posited to underlie the light waves does not exist. But because the mathematics developed to describe wave phenomena continued to achieve useful results, they continue to use the idea of wave as if there were something to wave. They often acknowledge that science no longer corresponds with some objective reality, and the resulting science is full of paradoxes. Because, like the philosophers, they eschew metaphysics, they cannot develop an alternative conceptuality that fits their evidence. Science itself suffers from the results.
Indian and Chinese philosophies include alternatives to substance thought much more fully than does European philosophy. Hence they have much to offer. But as we saw above they are not formulated in way that is directly relevant to the concerns of the contemporary world.
Whitehead’s basic conceptuality is closer to that typical of East Asia than to that typical of Europe. But because he developed it out of a background in mathematics and physics, it has a systematic rigor and relevance to contemporary issues that Asian philosophy usually lacks. Because he was not afraid of metaphysical questions, Whitehead worked out an alternative to substance thinking that fits the evidence of the sciences while differing from their usual formulations. In this way he offers to Asians a bridge to the correction of Western science and its incorporation into their own worldview.
Now I will take another tack in making my claim for Whitehead’s usefulness.
China is committed to modernization. Modernization is nearly equivalent to Westernization. There is no doubt that modernity in the West has brought great advances in knowledge and technology. It has also encouraged democracy and human rights. It has brought about an economic prosperity for masses of people that has no precedent in human history. There is much for which we Westerners, who are heirs of modernization, are grateful. But we are also painfully aware of its limitations. Modernity has been extremely, and damagingly, individualistic. In its later forms it has been preoccupied with gaining wealth and employing competitive means to this end. In the process it has strained the social fabric to the breaking point.
Modernity has denied any intrinsic value to the natural world and accordingly we have exploited our environment shamelessly. We now see that we pay a high price for this. The nature that has nurtured us so long is no longer able to do so. We are trying to slow the degradation of nature and preserve bits of it, but much is forever lost. And the policies of modernity continue to eat away at what is left. Modernity has led inevitably to an ecological crisis in which we are already involved but which will become far more acute in the decades immediately ahead.
The critique of modernity is now wide-spread. Most of what is called postmodernism leads to the abandonment of any quest for comprehensive vision. It attacks the idea of a master narrative or a cosmology. It leaves us with local knowledge that is powerless against the continuing advance of the steamrollers of modernity. Although it criticizes brilliantly, it offers few concrete proposals for the way ahead. On the whole, it is as alienated from the natural world as was the modernity it critiques. In some respects it carries dangerous tendencies within modernity to an extreme rather than providing a different point of departure.
Whitehead provides an alternative. He, too, was critical of the modern world, and his followers pursue and extend that critique. But he wanted not just to tear down the ideas of the modern world but also to replace them with more adequate ideas. These provide positive proposals for responding to the issues of the day. In this sense his ideas are part of the movement of constructive postmodernism. We need to have our thought checked and corrected by deconstructive postmodernism and enriched and developed through interaction with Asian, communitarian, ecological, and feminist thought as well as that of primal peoples. But there is thus far no indication that encounter with these other positions will undercut or invalidate our basic ideas. Modified and enriched by all these influences, Whiteheadian thought can suggest a way ahead in science, economics, politics, education, and social policy.
In the area of religion, China is now at a very interesting place. The traditional culture met the religious needs of people in a variety of ways. But, for reasons I have already indicated, that culture is no longer unproblematic. Partly this is because it was systematically attacked and weakened during the Red Guard period. Partly it is because modernization, by its nature, is in tension with traditional cultures. For a while leaders hoped that Communism would meet the needs that traditional religions once fulfilled. But today this is true for only a few. Accordingly, there is an openness in China for religious teaching of many varieties. Since Whitehead’s understanding of reality is so close to that of traditional Chinese thought, the comments above about Whitehead’s...
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