Thinking Nature v. 1 /10/ - Review of Thinking with Whitehead by Isabelle Stengers. Translated by Michael Chase. Foreword by Bruno Latour. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. 554 pp. $49.95 hardcover. Leon J. Niemoczynski Recently, William Wainwright is cited as having commented that, "while regrettable, process philosophy is dead" (George W. Shields, "Quo Vadis? On Current Prospects for Process Philosophy and Theology" in American Journal of Theology and Philosophy, Vol. 30, No. 2, 2009: 125).
Wainwright based his remark on the claim that those who have inherited
Whitehead’s and Hartshorne’s mantle, most notably John B. Cobb, David Ray Griffin, and more recently Roland Faber and Catherine Keller, have only a few scholars in apostolic turn to extend the tradition, modify it, and develop it. While certainly a controversial idea, it is by no means one that is not worth considering, especially at the outset of a review about a book which certainly demonstrates, in this author's judgment, that process-relational philosophy, despite a lack of a prolific scholarship in the area, is far from dead. To put it bluntly: Stengers' book shows that what process philosophy lacks in a quantity of scholarship, it finds in a quality of scholarship. Stengers' scholarship in particular offers a richness of insight that nuances for the better what one refers to when one speaks of Whiteheadian process philosophy. Originally published in 2002 as Penser avec Whitehead: "Une libre et sauvage creation de concepts”, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts (2011 in English translation) is a book wherein author Isabelle Stengers takes over thirty years of her experience with process philosophy and crafts over the course of 531 pages an extremely nuanced, subtle, and deft analysis of the implications of Whitehead's thought for the various sciences, aesthetics, ontology, and ecological theory. What makes this book unique is not just the fact that its recent translation and enthusiastic reception challenges the idea that process philosophy is no longer relevant, but that it illuminates the most obscure passages of Whitehead in such a way that one is
able to see how vis-à-vis contemporary currents of American and Continental research—Deleuze, Malabou, Brandom and others—that an understanding of Whitehead's thought is crucial, if not necessary. Bruno Latour, author of the book's foreword, remarks that, "Whitehead is thoroughly put to the test here, and yet I have no doubt that, had he lived, Deleuze would have celebrated this book as a major event in the geopolitics of philosophy: a great but neglected Anglo-American is reimported into France through Belgium, and the event is taken as the occasion to reinterpret pragmatism, Bergsonism, and empiricism. What a wonder! What an interesting ecological 'intercapture'!" (Foreword xi). Indeed, Stengers' book marks a major turn in the re-constitution of process-relational philosophy as a major player in the development of both the American and Continental philosophical traditions. With that said, Stengers walks her reader through the labyrinth of Whitehead's thought, asking her reader to "think with" Whitehead as she does. Stengers uses passages from Whitehead interspersed throughout every few paragraphs in order to stimulate and guide the journey which is both an engagement with and explanation of Whitehead's overall project - this in a reflective and pensive manner, hence the title of the book. The book has two parts, 'From the Philosophy of Nature to Metaphysics' and 'Cosmology'—and taken together both parts make up twenty five chapters. While in no way an easy guide to Whitehead, the compelling, exciting, and extremely unique ideas afforded by this book make the challenges, daunting length, and heavy intellectual labor involved with reading it well worth it. The book's first few chapters immediately reveal an unorthodox reading of Whitehead that has some unusual emphases, especially when compared to the standard treatments of Whiteheadian philosophy found in American process circles. It is Stengers' choosing to focus mostly on Whitehead's first properly philosophical book, The Concept of Nature and not Process and Reality that sets her work apart from others (Process and Reality does make its due chronological appearance later on, however throughout the book The Concept of Nature figures more prominently than any other text). For example, Chapter Two, "Events and Passage",
focuses on the exhibition of objects and their relationship to the mind whereas it does not provide an explanation of objects-as-processes given certain requisites and ontological-cosmological conditions—something standard to most introductions to Whitehead. I applaud Stengers' choice to spend so much time on The Concept of Nature as it certainly broaches Whiteheadian thought in an atypical and creative way: it offers a fresh way to approach Whitehead on objects and processes and draws new readers to the table. Thus, those interested in the philosophy of mind, phenomenology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of sense-perception would find Stengers' take on Whitehead interesting in this respect. Skipping ahead to Chapter Five, "Attention to Objects", Stengers explores another underrepresented feature of Whitehead's thought: his object oriented philosophy. Here the reader is taken through a tour of how perceptual objects are deposited in sense-awareness; but little attention at this point is paid to what Whitehead would call the ontological-cosmological "conditioning events" which are responsible for perception in general. Stengers' strategy at this point seems to be to set up a specifically Whiteheadian epistemology first (one that attends to objects in their own actuality) and then to explore Whitehead's metaphysics of virtuality second. While Whiteheadian epistemology and metaphysics are more intertwined than Stengers' analysis lets on, this is an extremely interesting move on her part, and so far as introductions to Whitehead go, it has not been done. This is both interesting and commendable. One also sees a "different" Whitehead than the one who is typically explained to be "all process".
Objects are emphasized as playing a more central role in the explication of the
Whiteheadian thesis which states that "a variety of objects form a variety of percipient events". Thus one finds Stengers claiming that objects and events are entangled in a field of activity— objects are said to have an important role as they ingress into events, and events are explained to be no less important as they become objects contributed to the objective immortality of the past. As Stengers' writes, "Objects and events are in strict reciprocal presupposition, and one can ask for nothing more" (Stengers 81). The key here is to understand that the ingression of objects has
a relation to various modes of being (virtuality and actuality, each a launching point for the other). The shape of the overall thesis behind Part Two, 'Cosmology', begins to emerge in Chapter Sixteen, titled "Thinking Under the Constraint of Creativity". While I cannot say that I wholeheartedly agree with Stengers' claim that, "The ultimate, in Whitehead's sense, cannot, as we recall, by any means be identified with any form of transcendence...", this chapter fleshes out how creativity does afford as a most basic category the novelty required for accidental conditions to change or evolve and acquire a social character which is of a total character—the many become one and are increased by one (Stengers 256). It seems that Stenger does admit "technical transcendence" for Whitehead, but by this she means that "creativity obliges us to think of conditions", the accidental effects of creativity.
Therefore, there is always something
transcendental, unseen, or "a little beyond" about creativity in that it "cannot be conceived as such" (Stengers 258). Taken in itself creativity is that which constitutes the "limits of thought" and transcendence must involve bumping up against those limits of thought, as we later find out. But for Stengers, transcendence - coming up against limits and in certain ways surpassing them is of course of a secular function, not necessarily a religious one (see Stengers 451). Chapter Eighteen is titled "Feeling One's World" and it explains how "what demands to be thought" (creativity in itself) "must be populated with concepts", this so that creativity can find its actualization and hence enter into the realm of actuated thought (Stengers 294). Stengers' Deleuzian background comes to the fore most strongly from this chapter onward, although, curiously, her statement that to feel the power behind the virtual ("to be affected by" a power which is vectorial, "here" rather than "there") seems to be at odds with earlier statements denying that creativity is not a power (see Stengers 256, 259). It is not until Chapter Twenty Two that the reader finds out how power and creativity fit together: they are aspects of a ground which reflects the meaning of a divine ordering in congruence with God.
Stengers explains that God's ordering of creativity is not coercive, it is a power that "bends" or "nudges" creativity in its flow; it does not necessarily force any direction or outright determine any end result. Here one is left with tensions waiting to find their resolution regarding treatment of Whitehead's God: for example we read that "Whitehead's God is neither patient nor impatient" (Stengers 392) and creativity in its neutrality is "nothing to be celebrated", that is, it is not personal nor does it belong to any person. Yet later we also read about a deeply personalistic God, that is, a God who is the "fellow sufferer who understands" (Stengers 453, 481). "God and the World", Chapter Twenty-Four, therefore awaits the reader as a long awaited peak of explanation, a place where the reader would hope to find reconciliation to such tensions that have dialectically wound up since Stengers began a treatment of Whitehead's metaphysics some two hundred pages earlier. In Chapter Twenty Four—a chapter which clearly yields Stengers' conclusion despite it being the chapter before last—those tensions are indeed resolved, though in a speculative and constructive manner that involves, as Stengers fully admits, an "interpretive choice" (Stengers 453). Stengers concludes that, knowing what to expect, we need not necessarily affirm God to be the ordering power behind an ultimate ground of creativity. While this affirmation involves a leap of speculative imagination, it is by no means required to grasp the essential elements of Whitehead's process thought. What cinches the point of Stengers own view is her claim, in agreement with some, that, "Process and Reality should either be rewritten with no God" or that the idea of God in the book challenges its coherence (Stengers 452). This, coupled with Latour's comment that, "Commentators have often tried either to drag Whitehead in theology seminars— forgetting that this God is there to solve very precisely a technical problem of philosophy—not of belief—or to get rid of this embarrassing appendix altogether" (Foreword xiii) seems to indicate Stengers' approach to the theological value of Whitehead's God: it is based in a technical and functional assessment of God's place in a metaphysical scheme and it is not a religious assessment at all. If contradictory terms were allowed, I'd be pressed to describe the general idea
presented here as a sort of "secular theism" or, in Derrida's and Caputo’s terms, a metaphysical "religion without religion." To conclude, this book review invariably cannot fully represent the erudition and technical detail found throughout such an in-depth, heavily nuanced, novel, and utterly creative work that spans as many pages as it does. Stengers' book is a journey, an adventure in ideas that revitalizes the process tradition's relevance for philosophers and their systems that now find themselves under close scrutiny (as mentioned—Malabou, Meillassoux, Brandom, as well as philosophical realism and speculative philosophy, philosophical naturalism, et cetera). Stengers has a strong but unorthodox showing in the first half of the book, and in the second half there are unique twists and turns that yield a surprisingly well oiled Deleuzian interpretive scheme at work. If pressed, I think the flavor of this book ultimately could be described as Stengers laying out an "object oriented" reading of Whitehead. This leads to her technical and functional analysis of God which is very much along the lines of Deleuze and to a lesser extent Leibniz. Had her reading rather passed through Deleuze and Bergson or Deleuze and Peirce I am left wondering whether some fundamental conclusions of the book may have turned out to be theologically different. Nonetheless, the conclusions of the book are well won.