Beyond Bifurcation

Today, we face a crisis in our very understanding of—not to mention in our relations with—what for a long time we have called "nature." Scientific research makes it increasingly hard for us to maintain any sort of human exceptionalism vis-à-vis the rest of the planet. Anthropologists have made it clear that not all human cultures share our own understandings of the nonhuman world. Theorists like Bruno Latour have questioned the very division between nature and culture that, for the past few centuries, we have taken for granted. Meanwhile, accelerating climate change—or, to put it more bluntly, the massive and catastrophic dislocation resulting from human-caused global warming—forces us to acknowledge that our own actions cannot be separated from the geological, meteorological, and biological processes with which they are unavoidably enmeshed.

In these circumstances, we can neither abandon nature as a term and as a referent nor continue to understand it in the ways we have done hitherto. As Didier Debaise puts it at the very start of his newly translated book, Nature as Event,

Our experience of nature is threatened by a growing tension between, on the one hand, the modern conception of nature that we have inherited, permeating each of our thoughts, and, on the other, current ecological changes. It seems that this tension has today reached a point of no return. The concepts we deploy, the abstractions we construct, our very modes of thought are no longer able to deepen or develop our experience of nature; they only obscure its meaning.

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In order to develop a mode of thought that is more adequate to our current crisis, Debaise urges us to take another look at "certain propositions" arising in the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947). This may initially seem strange, as Debaise freely acknowledges, because not much attention has been paid to Whitehead in the seventy-odd years since his death. It is hard to find a place for him in the history of philosophy. Whitehead doesn't fit easily into either analytic or continental paradigms. His work spans a wide variety of subdisciplines, ranging from studies of the logical foundations of mathematics to musings on the cultural role of religion. He addresses many of the traditional metaphysical concerns of Western philosophy since Descartes: mind and body, space and time, reason and experience, identity and relation. But his way of approaching these issues is unusual. He rejects many of the grounding assumptions of Western philosophical discourse and offers unfamiliar starting points in their place.

Moreover, Whitehead explicitly tries to produce an overarching speculative metaphysical system: a project of precisely the sort categorically rejected by nearly all his major contemporaries (starting with Wittgenstein and Heidegger). Whitehead's writing is dense and difficult to access; it is filled with strange terms of his own devising (prehension, concrescence) as well as terms to which he gives technical definitions that differ sharply from their common usages (feeling, society, God). Many of Whitehead's books—and especially his 1929 magnum opus, Process and Reality—have a decidedly scholastic cast, concerned as they are with subtle and highly abstract distinctions. This tendency toward scholasticism is all too often perpetuated in the writings of his interpreters. The dry, even tone and ramifying sentence structures of Whitehead's prose often conceal the fact that he is saying quite extraordinary things.

In the second half of the twentieth century, academic interest in Whitehead, in the United States at least, was limited to a few groups of theologians. Today, this picture has changed somewhat. There's a lively and inventive community of Whitehead scholars in American philosophy departments. Unfortunately, their numbers are small, and they don't have much dialogue with their analytic or continental colleagues. Increasing attention has also been paid to Whitehead in other areas of the humanities and social sciences, especially in science studies, media theory, and affect theory. Much of this interest is due to the influence of the Belgian philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers, who has written extensively and...