A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality
Isabelle Stengers
Theory Culture Society 2008; 25; 91
...
Whitehead on Philosophy
We can now turn to Whitehead, and the way he defined his philosophical
task.
Every science must devise its own instruments. The tool required for philosophy
is language. Thus philosophy redesigns language in the same way
that, in physical science, pre-existing appliances are redesigned. It is exactly
at this point that the appeal to facts is a difficult operation. This appeal is
not solely to the expression of the facts in the current verbal statements. The
adequacy of such sentences is the main question at issue. (1978: 11)
Here, again, adequacy is a matter of concern, but the concern is
different. The main point at issue for Whitehead is that our current verbal
statements, as well as the way we take our perceptions into account, are all
highly selective. They involve discarding what does not matter and, more
particularly, what there is no need to notice because it is always present.
We habitually observe by the method of difference. Sometimes we see an
elephant, and sometimes we do not. The result is that an elephant, when
present, is noticed. Facility of observation depends on the fact that the object
observed is important when present, and sometimes is absent. (1978: 4)
While experimental demonstration relies on transforming the ‘method of
difference’ into a ‘suspense drama’ – it is the difference between this and
that possible observation which makes the difference – the problem for
philosophy is the selective aspect both of what we perceive as a matter of
fact, and the way in which we describe it.
Adequacy is a trap for philosophy as soon as it concerns matters of
fact in the terms that we usually characterize it. If the philosopher starts
with apparently simple situations such as ‘I see here a grey stone’, she starts
from something already shaped by perceptive and linguistic interpretation.
The point, however, is not to start from an experience devoid of interpretation.
Whitehead famously remarked that if you wish to locate an experience
devoid of interpretation, you may as well ask a stone to record its
autobiography (1978: 15). And, I would add, it would be better still that
such a demand be made of Galileo’s carefully-polished, round balls, rolling
down an equally carefully smoothed, inclined plane. Indeed the whole aim
of the experimental activity of polishing and smoothing is that the autobiography
of the rolling ball would tell nothing about the ball, as such, in
order for the speed it gains to reliably testify to what we now call terrestrial
attraction (gravity). The intricate adventure that we call friction must not be
recorded. When friction matters, the motion of the ball no longer illustrates
one particular solution to an abstract, anonymous differential equation.
What happens, in such a case, demands a level of attention which today’s
engineers and physicists, who specialize in surface effects, still laboriously
learn how to pay.
In contrast, the kind of achievement that Whitehead aimed at could
be described as a maximization of friction, recovering what has been
obscured by specialized selection. This applies not only to Galileo’s selection
(the smoothing away of friction), but more generally to all the selections
produced by consciousness and language – for example, the very
important and successful abstractions which put emphasis on what matters
in our many specialized practices, including that of surviving.
If Whitehead can be characterized as a constructivist philosopher, it
is because by ‘disclosing’ he does not mean gaining access to some concrete
truth hidden by our specialized abstractions. If no experience is devoid of
interpretation, then what is prohibited from the start is that we should retain
some nostalgic memory of what we previously believed we genuinely knew
about nature, and entertain the possibility of a more authentic experience.
Whitehead’s speculative philosophy is not about trying to recover concrete
experience against its falsification by abstract interpretation. He recognized
his indebtedness to Bergson, and also to William James and John Dewey,
but he stated that one of his preoccupations ‘has been to rescue their type
of thought from the charge of anti-intellectualism, which rightly or wrongly
has been associated with it’ (1978: XII).
For Whitehead, we cannot think without abstractions, but this does
not mean that we are irretrievably separated from that which we try to
address. Abstractions, for Whitehead, are not ‘abstract forms’ that determine
what we feel, perceive and think, nor are they ‘abstracted from’ something
more concrete, and, finally, they are not generalizations. Whitehead was a
mathematician, and no mathematician would endorse such definitions. But
most of them would endorse Whitehead’s idea that abstractions act as ‘lures’,
luring attention toward ‘something that matters’, vectorizing concrete experience.
Just think of the difference between the mute perplexity and disarray
of anybody who faces a mathematical proposition or equation as a meaningless
sequence of signs, as opposed to someone who looks at this same
sequence and immediately knows how to deal with it, or is passionately
aware that a new possibility for doing mathematics may be present.
In order to think abstractions in Whitehead’s sense, we need to forget
about nouns like ‘a table’ or ‘a human being’, and to think rather about a
mathematical circle. Such a circle is not abstracted from concrete circular
forms; its mode of abstraction is related to its functioning as a lure for mathematical
thought – it lures mathematicians into adventures which produce
new aspects of what it means to be a circle into a mathematical mode of
existence.
This is why Whitehead could write, in Modes of Thought, that ‘The aim
of philosophy is sheer disclosure’ (1968: 49), while also defining its task as
that of redesigning language, and indeed redesigning it in such a way that it
has produced the mute perplexity and disarray of all those readers who
wonder how they can, using such a language, ever hope to define a table or
a human being. The aim of the abstractions that Whitehead designed is not
to produce new definitions of what we consensually perceive and name, but
to induce empirically felt variations in the way our experience matters. In
Modes of Thought, Whitehead wrote that the basic expression of this value
experience is: ‘Have a care, here is something that matters! Yes – that is the
best phrase – the primary glimmering of consciousness reveals something
that matters’ (1968: 116). For Whitehead, consciousness was an ongoing
adventure, not the sad tale of discovering our limitations and illusions.
There is a great difference between the adventures of mathematics and
philosophy, however. The mathematician may well redesign her mathematical
tools, but she may also trust them, while the philosopher must distrust
both language and the facts as they are expressed in current verbal statements.
This is why the analogy with physics’ experimental ‘appliances’ is
so interesting. Indeed the idea that experimentation appeals to facts as they
are observed by means of experimental appliances only refers to the stabilized
end-product of a difficult operation. As Andrew Pickering (1995)
marvellously characterized it, in his Mangle of Practice, experimenters may
well know in advance what they want to achieve – what, for instance, their
appliance should detect. However, a long process of tuning will nevertheless
be needed, within which nothing will be trusted, neither the human
hypothesis nor the observations made. Indeed, the process of tuning works
both ways, on human as well as on nonhuman agency, constitutively intertwining
a double process of emergence, of a disciplined human agency and
of a captured material agency.