Table Of Content

SPECULATIVE SPECULATIVE REALISM Series Editor: Graham Harman EMPIRICISM ‘In Speculative Empiricism, Didier Debaise expertly guides the reader on a remarkable voyage through Whitehead’s metaphysical masterpiece, Process and Reality. The juxtaposition of the two title words sets the agenda, giving notice from the start that we will be REVISITING WH ITEHEAD heading into unexpected territory. Here, speculation will become a S matter of experience, and experience, reciprocally, will be imbued with P E the futurity of potential. The result is a novel pragmatics of becoming C which Debaise maps with unerring lucidity and precision, providing both an introduction to key Whiteheadian concepts and a major U contribution to the scholarship that will be of equal interest to L specialists.’ A Brian Massumi, University of Montreal T I V A philosophy of speculative empiricism through a reading E of Whitehead’s Process and Reality E Can experience be thought systematically without transforming the M richness of the world as it is lived into reductive philosophical P generalities? Can the method of empiricism ever be reconciled with I a method of systematic cosmological speculation? R Didier Debaise’s reading of Whitehead shows clearly what a philosophy I C that makes this possible looks like, how it works and what is at stake. I Debaise’s reading focuses in on Whitehead’s attempt to construct a S metaphysical system of everything in the universe that exists whilst M simultaneously claiming that it can account for every element of our experience, everything enjoyed and perceived, willed or thought. D In this way Debaise illustrates how Whitehead’s philosophy offers a I D radically new way of conceiving the relations between experience I E and speculation. R D Didier Debaise is a researcher at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique E B and the Director of the Centre for Research in Philosophy at the Free A I University of Brussels. Tomas Weber is a PhD student in the Department S E of French at the University of Cambridge. Cover image: Shell, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, 1979 © The Barns-Graham Charitable Trust 2017. Photo: Bruce Pert Cover design: Michael Chatfield ISBN 978-1-4744-2304-5 DIDIER DEBAISE Preface by Isabelle Stengers • Translated by Tomas Weber Speculative Empiricism Speculative Realism Series Editor: Graham Harman Editorial Advisory Board Jane Bennett, Levi Bryant, Patricia Clough, Iain Hamilton Grant, Myra Hird, Adrian Johnston, Eileen A. Joy. Books available Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media, Levi R. Bryant Form and Object: A Treatise on Things, Tristan Garcia, translated by Mark Allan Ohm and Jon Cogburn Adventures in Transcendental Materialism: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers, Adrian Johnston The End of Phenomenology: Metaphysics and the New Realism, Tom Sparrow Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology, Markus Gabriel Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making Second Edition, Graham Harman Assemblage Theory, Manuel DeLanda Romantic Realities: Speculative Realism and British Romanticism, Evan Gottlieb Garcian Meditations: The Dialectics of Persistence in Form and Object, Jon Cogburn Speculative Realism and Science Fiction, Brian Willems Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead, Didier Debaise, translated by Tomas Weber Forthcoming books After Quietism: Analytic Philosophies of Immanence and the New Metaphysics, Jon Cogburn Infrastructure, Graham Harman Visit the Speculative Realism website at: edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/ specr Speculative Empiricism Revisiting Whitehead Didier Debaise Translated by Tomas Weber For Ian Crystal (1966–2012) Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: www.edinburghuniversitypress.com © Jon Cogburn, 2017 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. WA eC pIPu brelicsohr adc faodre tmhiics bbooookk si sa navda jiolaubrlnea flrso imn otuhre sBerlietcistehd L siubbrajercyt areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with hISigBhN e d9i7t8o r1ia 4l 7a4n4d 1p5ro9d1u 0c t(ihoanr vdablauceks) to produce academic works of lasting iImSBpNor t9a7n8c e1. 4F7o4r 4m 1o5re9 2in 7fo (rwmeabtrioeand vyi sPitD oFu)r website: edinburghuniversitypress. cISoBmN 978 1 4744 1594 1 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 1593 4 (epub) DThidei errig Dhte boaf iJsoe,n U Cno egmbuprinri stmo eb es pidéceunltaifitiefd. Laesc ture de Procès et réalité de Wtheh iateuhtheaodr o©f Lthibisr awiroirek P hhailso bsoeepnh iaqsusee rJt.e dV rinin , Paris, 2006. accordance with the Copyright, Designs and hPtattpe:n//tws wAwct. v1r9i8n8.f,r and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). English translation © Tomas Weber, 2017 Translated with the financial support of the University Foundation of Belgium Translated with the financial support of the University Foundation of Belgium Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road, 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry, Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY COGBURN 9781474415910 PRINT.indd 4 27/03/2017 16:53 A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 2304 5 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2306 9 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2305 2 (paperback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2307 6 (epub) The right of Didier Debaise to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Contents Series Editor’s Preface vi Translator’s Note x Preface Isabelle Stengers xii 1 Introduction 1 Part I Speculative Philosophy: Method and Function 2 What is Speculative Philosophy? 7 3 Creativity as Ultimate Principle 21 4 Actualising Creativity 30 Part II The Speculative Approach to Existence: Process and Individuation 5 What is a Process of Individuation? 43 6 What is the Subject? 66 7 Realisation of Self and Power 78 8 Pure Potentiality and Actuality 90 9 Temporal Dimensions of Actual Entities 104 Part III Experiences and Societies: Thinking Nature 10 A Universe of Societies 123 11 The Mode of Existence of Societies 138 12 Nature and Societies 151 13 Conclusion: What is Speculative Empiricism? 162 Works Cited 169 Index 175 Series Editor’s Preface Although the great English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) was born more than a century too early to be a Speculative Realist, he was without question speculative, and without question a realist. Hence there is no question that a well- executed book on Whitehead belongs in this series; Didier Debaise himself has expressed full agreement on this point. In the seventy years since his death, Whitehead has not quite secured the place in the Western philosophical canon that will one day surely be his. While philosophy for a century and more has been polarised between the Anglo-American analytic and Continental European traditions, Whitehead falls helplessly into a crack between the two. He is perhaps too speculative and wisemanish to impress the mechanical engineers of analytic philosophy who, if they admire Whitehead at all, do so only because of his mathematical work with their icon Bertrand Russell. This attitude is best symbol- ised by A. W. Moore’s stunning omission of Whitehead, obvi- ously a master metaphysician, from his book The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: an otherwise warmly inclusive volume that reaches across the aisle to welcome such debonair continental figures as Bergson, Heidegger, Derrida, and even the snowball- throwing Deleuze.1 Until recently, Whitehead was rarely read or mentioned by continentals either, being too different in kind from the first-wave German heroes (Kant through Heidegger) and second-wave French stars (primarily Derrida and Foucault) who filled up the pantheon of continental philosophy until the mid-1990s. Though some eccentric English and German scholars were reading Whitehead all along, for years his legacy was kept alive mainly 1 A. W. Moore, The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). vi Series Editor’s Preface vii among American process theologians such as Charles Hartshorne (pronounced ‘Heart’s Horn’) and John Cobb. Whitehead was as revered in these circles as he was ignored or chuckled over in the others. The opening of new continental doors for Whitehead commenced with some positive references by Gilles Deleuze, who long made a habit of drawing our attention to important figures half- or fully forgotten: Albert Lautman, Gilbert Simondon, Étienne Souriau, Gabriel Tarde. In The Fold, his widely read book on Leibniz, Deleuze refers to Whitehead glowingly as Leibniz’s rightful suc- cessor, and as ‘provisionally . . . the last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein’s disciples spread their misty con- fusion, sufficiency, and terror’.2 What continentally minded reader could resist such vindication, at the end of a century so unkind to continentals in institutional terms? Such was the prestige of Deleuze among those Francophone thinkers born just after the Second World War that most of his passing hints were eventually seized upon and developed by someone. In the case of Whitehead’s gradual acquisition of continental citizenship, much of the credit goes to the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers: severe and for- midable in character, scientific in education, catholic in reading tastes. We are fortunate that Tomas Weber’s beautiful English rendering of the present book is prefaced by Stengers herself: the one-time teacher of Debaise, her fellow Belgian. Like many others, I first became aware of Debaise’s work through the recommenda- tion of Bruno Latour, also an associate of Stengers – though of her own generation. It was in large part under Stengers’s influence that Latour began to incorporate Whiteheadian ideas into his masterful reformation of philosophy and the social sciences. Latour made partial repayment for the favour with his Foreword to Stengers’s own important book on Whitehead.3 Debaise the philosophical author has much in common with Debaise the person: formal, polite, soft-spoken, and also obser- vant, tenacious and innovative. In her Preface below, Stengers is quick to note what is also one of my own favourite aspects of Debaise’s book: his reminder that for Whitehead, ‘philosophy is 2 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 86. 3 Isabelle Stengers, Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). viii Speculative Empiricism self-evident or it is not philosophy’.4 With exquisite philosophical taste, what Debaise notices here is that beyond the intrinsic interest of any of Whitehead’s philosophical propositions, he is one of the most insightful philosophers about philosophy in the Western tradition. Analytic philosophy has always been thoroughly rationalist in spirit, but in our time continental philosophy is riding an ascendant wave of rationalism, due in large part to the influence of Alain Badiou and his prominent student Quentin Meillassoux. After several decades of cloudy postmodernist weather, the spirit of mathematics, natural science and radical Enlightenment pre- dominates once more. In this climate, philosophy aims at proofs in a manner reminiscent of Euclidean geometry. Whitehead, despite being a more accomplished mathematician than nearly any philosopher one could ever hope to meet, rejects this conception of what philosophy does. As he tells us in the opening pages of Process and Reality, philosophy does not proceed mainly through the rigorous logical deduction of eternally valid truths from unshakeable first principles – that confident method of great seventeenth- century thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza. Instead, philosophy’s proper method is descriptive generalization: which aims not only at rigour, but also at not excluding anything that happens not to make a good fit with our initial prejudices. Ultimately, philosophy must also be aware of its inevitable failure to fathom the superflu- ous depths of the cosmos. Where analytic thinkers have an almost religious faith in the central role of argumentation in philosophy, Whitehead patiently cautions that philosophies are not refuted, but abandoned. That is to say, what ultimately kills off a philosophy is not some ‘knockdown argument’ (a phrase beloved among analytics), but a general and sometimes vague insufficiency in accounting adequately for everything we know to be included in the world. It is ironic that a similar point was made later by that rationalist darling, the philosopher of science Imre Lakatos.5 As Lakatos teaches, there are never ‘decisive experiments’ in the history of science, because every scientific theory is born already falsified by counter-instances: for example, hundreds of unre- solved problems in the gravitational theory of Newton before 4 Alfred North Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 49. 5 Imre Lakatos, The Methodology of Scientific Research Programs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Series Editor’s Preface ix Einstein was even born. A scientific theory, like a philosophical one, is not a bundle of irrefutably rigorous arguments. Instead, it is a ‘research programme’ that might gradually come to be seen as either ‘progressive’ or ‘degenerating’, but not overthrown by a single strong counter-argument. Another powerful aspect of Debaise’s book is his unusual awareness of the decisions guiding his own particular reading of Whitehead. Above all, he pays close attention to Whitehead’s concept of ‘societies’, as distinguished from the ‘actual entities’ that are often seen as analogous to the Leibnizian monads. The central claim of his book, Debaise reports, is that ‘experience is defined by the particular relations between . . . what Whitehead calls “societies”. The concept of “societies”, then, is given a central place, in so far as it crystallises the relations between method and existence. The speculative project locates the key to its relation with experience through this concept.’ Debaise is fully aware of Whitehead’s rather unorthodox use of the word ‘society’, which is not exclusively human and sometimes not human at all, as when molecules or stars form societies of their own. And here we find ourselves outside the orbit of mainstream post-Kantian philosophy, which is so narrowly concerned with relations involv- ing humans and world, and so convinced that nothing can be said about nonhuman–nonhuman relations that is not already said better by the natural sciences. Debaise is too natural a speculative thinker to give in to such artificial and premature restrictions on the subject matter of philosophy. Indeed, he is perfectly suited as an interpreter of Whitehead, whom he reads not just accurately, but beautifully. I have long been puzzled by the lack of an English translation of this highly regarded book, and am proud that this series has made such a translation possible. Graham Harman Dubuque, Iowa January 2017