For many years Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) was an unfashionable figure within philosophy, known either as a brilliant British mathematician who co-authored the seminal Principia Mathematica (1910-1913) with Bertrand Russell, or as an obscure metaphysician whose ‘process philosophy’ gave birth to ‘process theology.’ He was perhaps best known for declaring all of western thought to be a ‘series of footnotes to Plato.’ Whitehead came to philosophy relatively late in his career, after retiring as a professor of mathematics at Cambridge in 1910, and brought a singular approach which bore little resemblance to any contemporary strands of either analytic or continental philosophy. He seemed too scientific for continental thinkers and not scientific enough for analytic thinkers, whilst his hermetic writing style was equally forbidding to both.

However, the last twenty years or so have seen a rise in curiosity towards Whitehead and his philosophical project. Much credit is due to Isabelle Stengers, the Belgian philosopher of science, whose Penser avec Whitehead (2002) has contributed to a particular intensification in Whitehead scholarship. Stengers’s comprehensive study was published in English in 2011 (in Michael Chase’s brilliant translation) and finally released in paperback in 2014. The book is no ‘short introduction’ to Whitehead, and Stengers often includes long passages of Whitehead’s prose without offering ‘explanations’ of them. This gives the book an interesting flavour, as we are often treated to unmediated access to Whitehead’s thought, whilst constantly being reminded of the warped perspective through which Whitehead is being presented. Stengers tells us, for example, that her understanding of Whitehead is inextricable from her understanding of Deleuze: ‘I thought Deleuze with Whitehead and Whitehead with Deleuze, two distinct and inseparable explorations.’ Much in the same way, though we may often feel as if it is Whitehead’s thought with which we are engaging in Thinking with Whitehead, this Whitehead is inseparable from Stengers.

It would be tempting to call Stengers’s enthusiasm for her subject ‘infectious’ but, after reading the book, the concept of infection assumes a different meaning to the one which we are used to. When Whitehead talks of being ‘infected’ by something, he talks of this something irresistibly imposing itself upon you, and leaving its mark. To be infected by something, in the Whiteheadian sense, is to have your being altered by it in some way. After reading Thinking with Whitehead, it is hard not to feel that Stengers has enabled. Whitehead’s project to infect your consciousness. Two major Whiteheadian themes which are particularly infectious: the idea of a philosophy of the ‘organism’ and the idea of a philosophy powered by creativity.

The determination to confront our world as an ‘organism’ is at the core of Whitehead’s thought. This involves a type of thinking which puts ‘everything in the same boat.' Stengers quotes Whitehead:

Everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick and choose. For us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon.

The philosophy of the organism aims towards a knowledge which combines human experience with scientific observation. Why is this ‘holistic’ approach appealing? What problem is it addressing? Whitehead identifies the problem in his first major philosophical work, The Concept of Nature (1920): ‘the bifurcation of nature.’ In this text, Whitehead confronts the problem of perception: what is it that we are aware of when we perceive? This is the problem of nature, since nature, as Whitehead defines it, is simply ‘what we are aware of in perception.’ According to Whitehead, existing accounts of nature fail to think nature as a whole, forcing it instead to bifurcate. As Bruno Latour explains in the book’s preface:

Bifurcation is what happens whenever we think the world is divided into two sets of things: one which is composed of the fundamental constituents of the universe … and the other which is constituted of what the mind has to add to the basic building blocks of the world in order to make sense of them.

What Whitehead calls the ‘bifurcation of nature’ recalls a central problem of modern philosophy, what Locke called the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and what since Kant has often been called the problem of ‘finitude.’ It stipulates that the human mind can only ever offer incomplete impressions of the external world which, for its part, contains properties which cannot be observed by our limited powers of perception. We are left with two types of nature: nature as we perceive it, and nature as it is ‘in itself’ (beyond our powers of perception). By encouraging us to conceive of nature as fundamentally splintered, the bifurcation of nature gives rise to specialised forms of knowledge which refuse to communicate with one another. Specialised forms of knowledge force us to choose particular forms knowledge to the exclusion of others; they are rooted in a belief that reducing the scope of our experience is the only way to truth. In other words, specialisation simplifies experience, and the tendency towards simplification is particularly evident within science. Stengers quotes from The Concept of Nature:

The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanations of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it.

Stengers highlights how simplifying nature, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to a situation in which poets who celebrate aspects of nature like the smell of roses and the sun’s brilliance must be called out for their confusion: ‘they should address their songs to themselves, and should turn them into odes of self-congratulation for the splendour of the human mind.’ On the other hand, ‘nature is a stupid business, bereft of sounds, odors and colors; it is only matter in a hurry, without end and without meaning.’ The bifurcation of nature dictates that the mind be severed from the external world and that these two be treated as fundamentally different components of experience, each demanding a fundamentally different mode of understanding. Specialisation, which grows out of bifurcation, necessitates a radical abstraction: a removal of the other approaches to nature which exist outside of the given area of specialisation. The knowledge that results from specialisation can only establish ‘imperfect categories of thought.' By contrast, Whitehead’s concept of nature, according to Stengers, must be ‘bereft of the power of dividing.' It must not ‘save’ one type of experience at the expense of all others, but rather ‘everything is going to have to be saved together, at the same time, and by the same means’ – the whole of nature must be thought as an organism.

By splitting up experience we succumb to what Whitehead calls the ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’: when we confine our thoughts to a specific, narrow area, we understand nature to be made up of ‘clear-cut definite things, with clear-cut definite relations.’ It is this ‘clear-cut’, definite viewpoint that claims to be ‘concrete.’ Stengers shows how Whitehead challenges this supposed concreteness in his analysis of our perception of the present, what he (after William James) calls the ‘specious present.’ In our perception of the present we do not perceive ‘first one end [of the ‘cognized present’] and then feel the other after it … but we seem to feel the interval of time as a whole, with its two ends embedded in it.’ Our perception of the world around us at a given moment does not have a clear start point and end point. Trying to conceive of nature as static runs counter to ‘what we are aware of in perception’ which is that nature is constantly moving and changing. Nature is itself a process, perpetually in a state of becoming, and it is comprised of smaller processes which themselves are in a state of becoming. By perceiving one particular thing within nature we also perceive the way that this thing relates to other things and the way that these relate to yet more things, so that what we perceive becomes an ever-expanding network of relations. To capture this fluid quality of perception, Whitehead adopts the term ‘event.' As Stengers notes,

What I have auditory experience of testifies to the fact that other events, although they are not discerned, include the event of which the sound is a factor, while this event itself includes others. The name “event” celebrates the “fact” that what we discern always has a beyond…every event declares itself to be related to other events, a part of some and made up of others.

Instead of forcing nature to fit within neat, clear-cut categories, Whitehead demands that we do justice to the fact that, in our perception of nature, nothing is ever clear-cut, and everything is always in motion, in a state of becoming - this is the cornerstone of Whitehead’s ‘process’ philosophy.’

Stengers lays emphasis on Whitehead’s uses of the term ‘percipient event’ to describe the human standpoint within nature, the person who perceives. For Stengers this term removes any privileged status that the human subject might have within nature, instead casting it as just another event or process within nature’s vast web of processes. Whitehead describes the ‘percipient event’ as ‘that in nature from which the mind perceives.’ It is a standpoint, a ‘foothold’ provided by nature which allows us to have perception. Human perception does not transcend nature, in fact Stengers stresses that the ‘percipient event’ belongs to nature, it ‘is connected to the whole of nature, even if it takes on the particular meaning that is required by the interpretation of perception as yours.' Whilst our own perception may feel special, it is ultimately an event within nature on equal footing with the whole host of other events to which it is connected. The concept of the ‘percipient event’ decentres the human subject and, in so doing, allows Whitehead’s philosophy to anticipate one of the key orientations of continental thought since 1945. As Stengers demonstrates, it also reverses Kant’s concept of experience. For Kant, the experience of the objective world is produced by the subjective mind, whereas for Whitehead it is the subjective mind that is produced by the objective world: it is thanks to nature that we can have knowledge of the world; the ‘percipient event’ does not create the world for us. Whitehead even proposes a new concept to replace the Kantian subject: the ‘superject’ – the subject who is produced by the world. This is a key point in understanding the contemporary appeal of Whitehead: by emphasising Whitehead’s reversal of Kant, Stengers presents a version of Whitehead which shares one of the fundamental commitments of the revival of materialism and realism which is currently unfolding within continental thought.

In Science and the Modern World (1925), Whitehead defines philosophy as the ‘critic of abstractions.' Stengers characterises Whitehead’s philosophy of the organism as a drive towards ‘a new mode of abstraction, capable of reconciling science and philosophy.’ Only a philosophy of the organism can interpret reality in a fully ‘general’ way that will ‘never provide the power to forget particularities, but, on the contrary, will point to the ambition to affirm all of them together.' It is committed to the idea that nothing within nature can be isolated from the rest of nature: the constituent parts depend on the whole just as the whole depends on its constituent parts. Stengers shows how this ‘general’ approach leads to a positive mode of thinking which values addition rather than subtraction; difference rather than sameness; complexity rather than simplicity. As a ‘critic of abstractions’, Stengers reads Whitehead’s philosophy as a form of abstraction which constantly strives to be less abstract by remaining open to new forms of experience, new forms of knowledge, and by resisting narrowness and selectiveness wherever it can. In Modes of Thought (1938), Whitehead poetically stipulates the goal of philosophy as ‘sheer disclosure.' Stengers puts it another way: ‘Whitehead does not deconstruct anything. Quite the contrary, he takes every construction to its cosmological power.’

This positivity also infuses Whitehead’s concept of truth. Truth, for Whitehead, is ‘imaginative rationalisation’: a thought is deemed true if it transforms what it describes, and the person who thinks it, in a positive way – if it brings about a ‘transformation of experience.' Stengers argues that Whitehead never tries to uncover any pre-existing truths, instead he is interested in ‘the production of new truths.’ Whitehead’s truth is therefore tied to an idea of novelty. It is only through a commitment to novelty, to imaginative rationalisation and the transformation of experience, that thinking can do justice to ‘a world which is never the same twice.’ Whitehead employs ‘creativity’ to describe this approach to thinking. Stengers sees creativity as the motor of Whitehead’s metaphysics, as it responds to the fact that ‘the problem of metaphysics is not that of a reality to be known, but to be produced.’

Creativity is central to Whitehead’s conception of society for Stengers. She first shows how Whitehead’s idea of society responds to the philosophy of the organism: society must ‘unite under the same definition all that “endures” in one way or another, whether electron or human person.' In order for this society to work, it must accommodate ‘originals’: individuals or groups of individuals who exist in a way which is different to or even challenges the mainstream currents within a given society. This principle reflects Whitehead’s conviction that ‘originality is the justification of life’, and that originality opposes tradition. Conceived in opposition to tradition, Whitehead’s notion of originality resonates with his ideas of novelty and creativity. A healthy society, as a society which provides possibilities for breaking tradition, is a society which fosters creativity. Whitehead has a name for these tradition-breaking possibilities: interstices. As Stengers explains, an interstice is anything which can ‘open a human collectivity to an outside whose intrusion suspends habitual social functioning’: the interstices bring about Whitehead’s ‘transformation of experience’ on a social level. Taking Whitehead at his word, Stengers suggests that:

Perhaps we have to deal with a positive culture of interstices, with the adventure of a regime of original and permanent renewal, that ceaselessly re-creates what will be described as a relation of “traditional” belonging.

To imagine a social regime characterised by ‘original and permanent renewal’ requires a considerable flight of fancy. By the end of Thinking with Whitehead, Stengers has shown how it is precisely Whitehead’s willingness to risk such flights of fancy which give his thought a particularly ‘infectious’ quality. Stengers observes that, if Western philosophy is indeed a series of ‘footnotes to Plato’ for Whitehead, this is because Plato established philosophy as the contemplation of something called ‘an idea,’ an activity which activates ‘the intrinsic possibilities of the human.’ Stengers suggests that Whitehead’s most quoted phrase means the opposite of what it seems to mean. Instead of reducing philosophy, Whitehead’s assertion expresses philosophy’s debt to Plato’s understanding of humanity, and his affirmation that only ‘humans are capable of accepting what ideas demand, without being constrained by any force other than that of the idea itself.’ It was Plato who established philosophy as this boundless pursuit of ideas, echoed in Whitehead’s ‘adventures of ideas.’ Stengers notes how, for Whitehead, the old idea that ‘philosophy begins with wonder’ is alive and well, particularly when philosophy creates

…propositions that possess individuals far more than individuals possess them. This is why, when philosophy has succeeded in doing what it can do, not only is wonder still there, but it henceforth infects all the statements whose vocation was to explain the world, that is, to disenchant it.

Philosophy begins and ends in wonder: a very attractive thought, and one which typifies the infectiousness of Stengers’s interpretation of Whitehead. Far from obscure and hermetic, in Stengers’s hands Whitehead’s thought feels adventurous, inventive, and open to even the most radical modifications. Presented in this way, the allure of Whitehead is easy to understand.

Simi Freund studied French and German. He currently works as an independent cultural researcher and semiotician.

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