________________
Whitehead's Constructive Metaphysics.... : 33
said flight, to check for errors, to expand and stimulate thought.
This generalization, however cannot dismiss any form of experience in the interest of the system, but must consider the whole of evidence, so that nothing can be omitted.22 He rejects supernatural explanations, holding to what he calls the ontological principle: the claim that “actual entities are the only reasons," that the search for a reason is always the search for an actual fact which is the vehicle of that reason,” for “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity.”23 This means that empiricism is ultimately correct: all our knowledge comes from experience and there is nothing outside experience, or beyond it. This also suggests that Whitehead seeks to produce a metaphysics that is nonanthropomorphic and nonanthropocentric.
This grounds diaspora Jain ethics in a metaphysics of discovery, grounded in the principles of non-violence, multi-view and non-possession. What will be spoken subsequently will be a further elucidation of how Whiteheadian metaphysics serves the needs of diaspora Jains and possibly providing the cradle for orthodox Jains.
Creativity In Jain metaphysics, the ultimate in its metaphysical system is the soul. Soul is the animator of matter, the reason for our practices, the end goal for its liberation. It is the essence, the unseen, always showing an aspect of itself, yet when one tries to engage it, it disappears. It is the unseen reality which moves the universe. In Whiteheads Philosophy of Organism, the category of the ultimate is creativity. Creativity is the unseen, the clinamen, what allows the novel to arrive. Because we do not see it, it both induces the process of actualization, as well as the expression of the process.24
For Whitehead, Creativity is the universal of universals, the ultimate principle by which the many, which are the universe disjunctively, become the one actual occasion, which is the universe conjunctively. It lies in the nature of things that the many enter into complex unity.”25 This notion of creativity embodies, or rather encompasses, the production of novel togetherness. This is distinct, I believe, from the orthodox perspective, since the process of being as both permanence and flux is one way of thinking of process. But for Whitehead, the creation of actuality, the production of novelty requires each individual component par- ticipating in its becoming. It is not the letting go of an atom and the taking of an atom; it is in each event creatively taking in the universe as complex chaos and bringing into a social order, distinct from its prior occasion. This creativity as the principle of novelty undergirds what we see in the process of diaspora Jains finding their space in Jain religion, philosophy and society. They are taking in their context disjunctively, their upbringing, their western context, the experiences of their daily lives, the issues they are facing, the acts of others and its effects and are ordering it so that they can respond to it in some way. Creativity allows the re-imagination of ahiṁsā from a personal, inward response to a social, outward response.
