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  • Whitehead's Account of the Sixth Day
  • Isabelle Stengers (bio)

The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech and they became souls.

Alfred North Whitehead1

This sentence, concluding the chapter "Expression" in Whitehead's Modes of Thought, is typical of the kind which made him what has been characterized as one of the most often quoted, and the least often read, among twentieth-century philosophers. If you quote such a sentence, it may give your text a poetic touch, as if a breath of fresh air entered the closed room of your argumentation. Somebody else is authorizing you to make present, in a suggestive nutshell, what you never would dare write, or even think, in your own name. But usually, you would not be able to defend the quote: you just felt the need to transmit it, to transmit the refreshing effect it produced on you when you read it, most of the time as already quoted by somebody else. If asked, maybe you would protect yourself behind the protest that it is only a beautiful metaphor for your own serious, responsible ideas.

My point here will be that there is never ever any metaphor in such Whiteheadian sentences, and that the poetic touch, the experience of fresh air, owes nothing to free inspiration and everything to hard technical construction. The verbs "to give" and "to become," as well as the nouns "speech" and "souls," may well produce the impression of immediate understanding, their particular articulation [End Page 35] then producing the poetic touch. But they are first of all technical Whiteheadian terms, the very conceptual role of which entails the imaginative jump produced by their articulation. And, as with all Whiteheadian concepts, their meaning cannot be elucidated right away, just as an animal cannot be approached right away: in both cases, you need some slowing down and learning what they demand and how they behave.

I will thus propose such an approach to Whitehead's account of the sixth day. A rather involved approach, since each step will try to slow down the on rush of predictable interpretations. I will try to have the reader feel what it takes to approach Whitehead, which is also how he challenges our habits of thought.

There is a first point, however, which I wish to make utterly and directly clear. Correcting the biblical account of the sixth day, Whitehead accepts that we humans, gifted with speech, may be thought of as "creatures"; but the "He" who gave us speech is not to be identified with God as the author, master, and creator, or even as the One who would have been able to give us the capacity for speech as something ready-made. In Modes of Thought, we deal with modes of thought indeed, that is, for Whitehead, with the way important experiences have found historical expression: "History is the record of the expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity."2 The peculiar feeling that is expressed by any account of the sixth day is our feeling of ourselves as creatures among creatures, but also as separated in some peculiar way from our fellow creatures. God may or may not be involved, but the historical record delivers one word to characterize this peculiarity, which Whitehead accepts: this is the word "soul." We will thus have to understand the difference between the Whiteheadian and Christian souls: our souls were not given, we "became" souls.

Yet as soon as we free Whitehead's sentence from ready-made religious interpretations, we risk falling into another trap, today a much more powerful one. And here begins the hard work, against the readiness of many in the human sciences to endorse forgetting about a "substantial" soul, and to confirm instead that human subjectivity and culture can indeed be defined as conditioned by language.

Something very important has happened as a result of this substitution. To be created as well as to be given refers to a problem of existence, while to be conditioned refers to a problem of explanation, that is, of knowledge. More precisely, it refers to an "objective" knowledge, deducing what exists, including our claims to "have...

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