Risking the speculative: on problems and beginnings
Deleuze reminds us that beginnings in philosophy are perilous: ‘Where to begin in philosophy has always – rightly – been regarded as a very delicate problem, for it means eliminating all presuppositions’ (DR: 129). Most often for philosophy in the ‘old style’ (DR: xxi), such elimination is motivated epistemically. We seek to eliminate presuppositions when they propagate inherited illusions of doxa. Eliminating presuppositions is thus a prerequisite for gaining truth. Such methodological orientation, inflected through different contexts and aims, is constitutive for what it means to think philosophically: from Socrates to Descartes to Hegel and on. Philosophers question what is thought to be obvious or self-evident.
While such orientation is impeccable in principle, in practice its circularity is notorious. Deleuze accordingly distinguishes between ‘objective presuppositions’ and ‘subjective’ presuppositions. For the former, elimination through ‘axiomatic rigor’ is possible: this is the procedure of doctrinaire scientific method. But the results of such elimination still risk certifying presuppositions of the deeper lived paradigm within which their axioms are formulated. Getting to the level of such paradigmatic presuppositions also requires interrogating subjective presuppositions, which is far more challenging. Can these be eliminated? Given their entrenchment in experiential grain, the possibility of elimination requires first bringing them into view through questioning the obvious. Calling these presuppositions ‘subjective and implicit’ and ‘contained in opinions rather than concepts’ (DR: 129), Deleuze refers to the perennial efforts of the philosopher to bracket all lived attitudes, only for the Ourobouros-like elusiveness of this effort to return again and again. One philosopher’s neutral beginning is exposed as full of presupposition by the next: as Hegel critiques Descartes, as Heidegger critiques Hegel, and the circle turns again.1 For Deleuze, these criticisms have in common an ‘attitude of refusing objective presuppositions, but on condition of assuming just as many subjective presuppositions’ (DR: 129).
Because what is deemed speculative depends on the audacity of its departure from consensus or convention, the status of presuppositions is all the more acute. This status cannot be settled in general; it requires understanding what is being challenged, how and why. There is no neutral ground upon which to easily demarcate the (pejoratively) speculative from the honestly respectable. Without jettisoning all sense of such demarcation, this emphasises that orientation towards the speculative is already entangled with pre-philosophical intuitions and complexities of a thinker’s affective economy. Such pre-philosophical intuitions inform more developed metaphysical inclinations, in particular with regard to one’s sense of reality as, either, finished and determined, or, open and transforming (Parmenides or Heraclitus). These inclinations are not determined by affective economy, but a relation cannot be denied. The relevant affective tension is that between perceived safety or security and risk or danger. Undoubtedly, the speculative is risky, so the question is what risks are worth taking and why?
The stakes of presuppositions thus involve the very motivation of thinking. Why risk thinking? Can we think safely? To repeat, what risks (in thought) are worth taking and why? A dominant response to this question has been to seek the security of denying its relevance by establishing apodictic certainty. There is no question of risk if thought discovers that which cannot not be true, the necessary, the eternal. The power of this ideal is undeniable, even if its outcomes since Kant tend to be presented in negative terms. That is, rather than positive articulation of the eternal, the philosopher establishes necessary limits. Only then, in the words of Kant, can metaphysics be set on the ‘secure path of a science’.2 Notwithstanding statistical procedures based on inductive probabilities nor the esoterica of contemporary physics’ indeterminacies and relativities, Kant’s wording still reflects a popular image of science. This image privileges apodictic certainty as unquestioned good. In Whitehead’s language, this ideal functions as a ‘propositional lure’ or ‘lure for feeling’ that motivates, attracts and organises intellectual endeavour.3 While a certain moment of speculation might be necessary, its risk is underwritten by the promise of a knowledge defined through certainty. Such a knowledge minimises risk and maximises security in eliminating questions by discovering what-must-be-the-case.
This kind of response is impregnable in its internal logic. But for both Deleuze and Whitehead, it covers over what remains a decision to privilege a particular image of security as unassailable. Covering over this choice, that is, denying that it is a choice by pretending it is a universal good, operates as a presupposition. In particular, Deleuze and Whitehead are interested in the extent to which this tacit presupposition, in remaining invisible, blocks or inhibits creative alternatives. If the first response assumes the good of security as the ability to deny the relevance of the question ‘what risks are worth taking and why’, another choice is to emphasise this question as always relevant. The perpetual relevance of this question (what risks are worth taking and why) reflects the impossibility, in principle, of knowing what is ultimately possible ahead of time. It reflects the impossibility of a one size fits all answer to the question of what risks are worth taking and why. Instead of denying the relevance of this inherently unstable question, an alternative choice privileges speculative experimentation in the interests of creation precisely because of this instability. Certainty and creativity than appear in fundamental, mutually informing, tension. Certainty is aligned with safety, creativity is aligned with risk, and neither can fully extricate themselves from the other.
Negotiating this tension between mutually desirous goods (security and creativity) places the difficulty of presuppositions in a different light. It is no longer a question of eliminating presuppositions so much as it is one of studying them, testing them, experimenting with them. Such study and experimentation are no less rigorous than the presumed clarity of elimination. On the contrary, the goal of achieving the clarity of a first principle through the elimination of all presuppositions is easily conflated with a procedure of simplification in which we end up certifying what we already think. Indeed, in the hubris of claiming to eliminate presuppositions, we often entrench them more deeply and make their interrogation more unlikely. Speculative experimentation with presuppositions is a different manner of encountering the problem.
This encounter is not without its own observational, formal and affective challenges. Beginning with habits of observation, Whitehead reminds us that routine and assumption can render observation dull or impoverished. Because we ‘observe by the method of difference’ (PR: 4) we fail to notice that which does not present as departure from the ordinary while also presuming that we already understand the ordinary.4 In this sense, the loop of observation is closed and repeats its own structuring assumptions. Whitehead’s notion of philosophical speculation calls for more intense attention precisely because ‘factors which are constantly present’ are dismissed or not observed at all (PR: 5). His speculative concepts function as modes of ‘imaginative thought’ (PR: 5) designed to heighten attention. In contrast to caricatures of idle fantasy or whimsical escape, Whitehead understands the need for heightened attention under the influence of imaginative thought as corrective to the omnipresent temptation to omit that which does not fit preconceived ideas. These preconceptions function at many levels, including prevailing formal or normative ideals. Whitehead is particularly concerned about the way in which the formal criterion of simplicity can tacitly structure attention. Because ‘we are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest’, Whitehead declares that ‘the guiding motto in the life of every Natural philosopher should be, Seek simplicity and distrust it’ (CN: 104).
The tendency towards simplification is reinforced by formal assumptions constitutive of what Deleuze calls the dominant ‘image of thought’. The image of thought is structured around the form of representation as self-evident and obvious: ‘Everybody knows, no one can deny, is the form of representation and the discourse of the representative’ (DR: 130). While it is true that ‘the philosopher proceeds with greater disinterest’ with regard to particular content, the form of representation still structures this variance by ‘propos[ing] as universally recognized . . . what is meant by thinking, being, and self-in other words, not a particular this or that but the form of representation and recognition in general’ (DR: 131, emphasis added). Despite its pervasiveness, Deleuze is keen to show that this form is neither necessary nor normatively neutral. Most importantly, the dominant image of thought presumes that ‘thought has an affinity with the true; it formally possesses the true and materially wants the true’ (DR: 131). This reinforces a ‘moral’ choice to privilege the ‘same’ at the expense of difference, thus bolstering the status quo and insulating thought against the risks of creation. Though it may require a fortitude of exertion, because thought’s capacities are preordained to lead us to the true, these efforts remain secure and safe. The cogitatio natura universalis comes with a guarantee: if you play by the rules, you will achieve truth.
Assumptions of thought’s ‘good will’ and ‘upright nature’ perpetuate an image of thinking as the operation of a faculty naturally inclined to find truth. Since thinking has this natural inclination, it can simply proceed in its ordinary modes. This preserves ‘recognition’ as thought’s model: exercise your natural faculty to recognise what is already true. Importantly, this assumption prevails at the formal level and as such cannot be treated just by interrogating particular content. Indeed, Deleuze is not interested in wielding his diagnosis of the dogmatic image of thought as a means of rejecting specific philosophical claims. Such claims must be engaged and thought through on their own terms. Nevertheless, Deleuze can grant that the philosopher typically ‘recognizes nothing in particular’ while still arguing that recognition as model for thinking structurally inhibits ability to think beyond ‘the recognizable and the recognized’ (DR: 134).
By assimilating creativity and innovation onto familiar terms of already charted ‘positions’, thought does not confront the unknown and is not inspired to create beyond what has already been posed. This perpetuates a sense that the important philosophical problems are already understood: ‘We are led to believe that problems are given ready-made’ (DR: 158) and risks are confined to failing to solve a puzzle whose terms are not questioned. Such thinking ‘recognizes only error as a possible misadventure . . . and reduces everything to the form of error’ (DR: 148).5 Denying thought’s capacity to pose its own problems occludes its creative potential. But such creative potential is not inherent in the ordinary functioning of thought. As Deleuze claims: ‘the problem is not to direct . . . a thought which pre-exists in principle . . . but to bring into being that which does not yet exist . . . To think is to create . . . but to create is first of all to engender “thinking” in thought’ (DR: 147). This emphasis on the creative potential of thought is not neutral and carries its own risks of circularity. But in the context of presuppositions, it follows a coherent logic: assuming the terms of an inherited problem and accepting unquestioned the form of what counts as ‘good’ thinking is unlikely to force real thinking. Deleuze thus declares the dogmatic image of thought ‘a hindrance to philosophy’ (DR: 134). Indeed, because of the hegemony and invisibility of these formal assumptions in establishing obvious criteria, it is necessary that: ‘someone – if only one – [has] . . . the necessary modesty [of] not managing to know what everybody knows …’ (DR: 130, emphasis added).
These observational and formal dimensions intersect in the affective. Confronting the heretofore unthought is dangerous, scary even. To ‘not manage to know what everybody knows’ invites vulnerability. Why submit to this risk? Indeed, the very endorsement of creative experimentation is already entangled with such affective diversity. Where one delights in mystery and the possibility of surprise, another shudders at a sense that everything we ‘know’ might be ‘wrong’. Even as the unknown promises adventure, it is at once source of dread and anxiety.
In the context of such affective variability, Michèle Le Doeuff shows how Kant’s thought is structured by an economy privileging certainty and safety in the name of secure ‘possession’ (1989: 8–20). Drawing on a psychoanalytic orientation, her analysis shows the extent to which values of certainty and safety function as unquestioned ‘lures’ that orient the excursions of Kant’s thinking. While it would be foolish to reject an understandable desire for a measure of safety, this value is variable in its expression in a manner which Kant’s characterisation of the risks of thought ignores.
Opening the third chapter of the Transcendental Analytic, Kant characterises his enquiry as having discovered an ‘island’ which is the ‘land of truth’ (Kant 1998 [1787]: 354/B294).6 Such an island is the only safe terrain for habitation, whereas it is surrounded by ‘a broad and stormy ocean’ which is the ‘true seat of illusion’ (1998 [1787]: 354). Illusion is characterised by dynamism and inability to offer secure or certain harbour; instead, it is a domain ‘where many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands’ thus ‘entwin[ing the voyager] in adventures from which he can never escape and yet also never bring to an end’ (1998 [1787]: 354). Such a condition can only be a source of deception, and therefore the task of critical philosophy is to establish the limits of the understanding so as to ‘distinguish whether certain questions lie within its horizon or not’. Without the certainty of these limits, we are never ‘sure of its [reason’s] claims and its possession’ and ‘must always reckon on many embarrassing corrections when it continually oversteps the boundaries of its territory (it is unavoidable) and loses itself in delusion and deceptions’ (1998 [1787]: 355/B297, emphases added).7
There is a powerful lure to Kant’s framing of the stakes of thinking, one that he makes explicit in stating that ‘those who reject . . . the procedure of the critique of pure reason can have nothing else in mind except to throw off the fetters of science altogether, and to transform work into play, certainty into opinion, and philosophy into philodoxy’ (1998 [1787]: 120, Bxxxvii, emphasis added).8 But, without entering into the formidable details of his procedure, it is striking that this rhetorical device also displays a classic mode of prejudging common to the dogmatic image of thought – if you do not follow the ‘one true’ procedure, you can only be a charlatan. The point is not to convince those attracted to Kant’s framing that it is wrong. Rather, I want only to highlight the extent to which this need not be a universal orientation towards the risks of speculative thinking. A privileging of possession perceived as immunisation against the ‘embarrassment’ of correction thus should not be presented as the sole viable starting point. This is why Whitehead characterises two basic orientations in philosophy in terms of their ‘quarrel between safety and adventure’ (MT: 173). Privileging safety leads to what Whitehead calls ‘the fallacy of the perfect dictionary’, in which it is held that ‘mankind has consciously entertained all the fundamental ideas which are applicable to its experience’ (MT: 173). This orientation follows the intuition of reality as determinate, fixed and essentially static. Whitehead instead endorses what he calls the ‘speculative school’, whose mission is to ‘enlarge the dictionary’ (MT: 173).9 Rather than clarifying concepts that already exist (though this can be a necessary, but not sufficient, aspect of thought), the speculative school rejects the presupposition that we already have all of the concepts needed to understand reality. Implicitly, the speculative attitude follows an intuition of the real as dynamic and in process rather than static or fixed. If this is the case, certainty becomes more suspicious since it likely involves affirming static and partial propositions as falsely comprehensive.
Just as Deleuze worries that the dogmatic image of thought hinders creative alternatives, Whitehead’s choice of ‘adventure’ is motivated by a sense that the risk is worth it insofar as we cannot presume that we have achieved certainty about the nature of reality: ‘the chief error in philosophy is overstatement . . . [where] the estimate of success is exaggerated’ (PR: 7). Creative alternatives, for both Deleuze and Whitehead, are motivated by a spirit of metaphysics as seeking to approach the real independent of inherited convention or orthodoxy. Whitehead indeed does not hesitate to refer to speculative philosophy as ‘seeking the essence of the universe’ (PR: 4). But we cannot presume that this essence is easily accessed through language or proceeds from traditional first principles: ‘Philosophers can never hope finally to formulate . . . metaphysical first principles’ because ‘deficiencies of language stand in the way inexorably’ (PR: 4).
Deleuze and Whitehead remain vulnerable to sceptical attacks by those wedded to terms and logics they are trying to innovate beyond because they understand that philosophical thought impervious to objection is unlikely to do anything at all. When Kant deems the speculative as ‘the childish endeavor of chasing after soap bubbles’ (Kant 1997 [1783]: 44), he presumes the only criterion for success is certainty in the name of possession. Whitehead and Deleuze reject this. In a clear case of Whiteheadean influence, Deleuze writes, ‘Philosophy does not consist in knowing and is not inspired by truth. Rather, it is categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that determine success or failure’ (WIP: 82).10
Rejecting universal first principles is defiantly not a rejection of metaphysics as such. The motivation for ‘not managing to know what everybody knows’ is thus not primarily negative or deconstructive. Rather, it is in the context of efforts to think the real while acknowledging that ordinary habits of thought (what everybody knows) hinder this effort. The test for creation is thus not merely novelty for novelty’s sake. Rather, as Whitehead writes, ‘the speculative school appeals to direct insight, and endeavors to indicate its meanings by further appeal to situations which promote such specific insights’ (MT: 173).
Everything depends on how we understand the status of such appeal to direct insight. Given Whitehead’s discussions of the challenging intersection between language and speculative thought, it is too hasty to understand such direct insight as translating unequivocally into its propositional representations. If it did, Whitehead would be susceptible to Sellars’s critique of the myth of the given or charges of naïve romanticism or mysticism. When such ‘direct insight’ is appealed to as ineffable evidence, then thinking ends rather than begins. For Whitehead, such appeals do not serve as conceptual justifications, but rather as invitations to attention. The insight in question is not the conclusion of a discursive argument, but rather the experiential presence out of which discursive thought and argumentation emerge.
Concepts might open a more rigorous attention to this experiential presence, or they might reduce, close or deny it. For Deleuze and Whitehead, if philosophy is to do more than repeat sterile presuppositions, it must acknowledge there is more going on than recognition of something already known. Deleuze writes, ‘Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter’ (DR: 139). An encounter is not governed by categorisation into pre-existent categories, but rather exceeds conceptual categories in being fundamentally affective before it is representational. Such an encounter ‘may be grasped in a range of affective tones: wonder, love, hatred, suffering. In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed’ (DR: 139). Depictions of experience which discount the way affective encounters serve as pre-representative ground are just skimming the surface.
Entrenched habits of thought enable this superficiality by insulating the thinker from risks inherent in encountering what exceeds the known or understood. This is why Whitehead lists ‘trust in language as an adequate expression of propositions’ along with ‘the subject-predicate form of expression’ as two ‘habits of thought’ that his speculative philosophy is most concerned to challenge (PR: xiii). Such habits, so embedded as to be almost invisible, are paradigmatic of the form of ‘what everybody knows’. This is notably demonstrated in the way that the ‘overemphasis on Aristotle’s logic’ repeatedly projects a subject-predicate logical and grammatical form onto metaphysical thinking, a worry that is an operative premise for all of Whitehead’s work.11 This manifests in the metaphysical habit of ‘the ingrained tendency to postulate a substratum for whatever is disclosed in sense-awareness’ (CN: 12) and the way that grammar structures casual logic. Most specifically, the ontological prioritising of nouns as the real substances to which contingent verbs occur is so entrenched as to appear self-evident. This conflates a ‘convenient form of speech’ with a subject-predicate form deemed metaphysically universal. Whitehead observes:
Predication is a muddled notion confusing many different relations under a convenient form of speech . . . the relation of green to a blade of grass is entirely different from the relation of green to the event which is the life history of that blade for some short period and is different from the relation of the blade to that event. (CN: 12)
The radicality of this observation highlights the tension between ‘managing to not know what everybody knows’ and expressing the efforts of this thought through received linguistic tools. Despite its deficiencies, language remains necessary for the expression of thinking even as the speculative philosopher challenges presuppositions encouraged in its grammar. The speculative philosopher employs language while remaining on guard against its tendencies towards reification, careless generalisation and slippage between grammar and metaphysics. As Whitehead says, ‘words and phrases must be stretched towards a generality foreign to their ordinary usage; and however such elements of language be stabilized as technicalities, they remain metaphors mutely appealing for an imaginative leap’ (PR: 4).
Imaginative leaps are notoriously tricky. They occur before the backdrop of what Isabelle Stengers refers to as ‘dual temptations’: while they clearly resist construing philosophy in ‘the [Kantian] role of guardian of rationality’, they also must evade the temptation of purporting to ‘escap[e] rationality through the pathos of inspiration or emotion’ (2014: 188). Thus, when Whitehead insists that ‘the aim of philosophy is sheer disclosure’ (MT: 49) and the ‘eliciting of self-evidence’ (MT: 107), such disclosures thread a gap between conventional presuppositions (what everybody knows) and the interior experience of the inspired. It may be the case that this interior inspiration is an effect of Whiteheadean or Deleuzean ideas, but the work of the speculative philosopher must be to concretise such inspiration through skilful use of concepts. If the imaginative leap cannot be avoided, just leaping alone is not the goal.
Whitehead’s imaginative leap is thus leavened by a need for observation and a principled fallibilism: ‘The true method of discovery is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation, it makes flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it lands again for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation’ (PR: 5). Without these constraints, experimental iconoclasm can be overcelebrated uncritically as end-in-itself. Such celebration of the novel for the novel’s sake is easily co-opted and encouraged by the procedures of IWC (Integrated World Capitalism)12 and its manufactured thirst for the new trend, the new style, the new fad. Without care, adoration of the new can be just as philosophically vacuous and stultifying as the dogmatic image of thought.13 Leap-taking effects engendered by speculative constructions invite careful consideration of their manners of responding to problems. Challenging ‘what everybody knows’ requires locating a problem in which what everybody knows is, at least in part, constitutive of the problem.
Attending to the bifurcation of nature
At the outset of The Concept of Nature, Whitehead names the ‘bifurcation of nature’ as the ‘fallacy’ with which ‘modern natural philosophy is shot through and through’ (CN: ix).14 Rather than static errors in content alone, fallacies are habits of thought that effect what it is possible to think. Fallacies do something to thought by structuring the framings of abiding problems.
The Concept of Nature is a strange and beautiful book that has taken on a renewed life in the context of recent Whitehead interest inflected through Isabelle Stengers and Deleuze.15 The book’s impetus is the inaugural course of Tarner Lectures at Trinity College given in the fall of 1919, whose topic is stated as: ‘the philosophy of the Sciences and the Relations or Want of Relations between the different Departments of Knowledge’ (CN: 1). The text that results, published in 1920, forms, as he puts it, a ‘companion volume’ to his 1919 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge. Both books display Whitehead’s training as a mathematician and his interest in emerging relativity theories in physics. They are written, in some respects, before Whitehead becomes a ‘philosopher’, or at least before this vocation becomes officially recognised in the invitation to join the Harvard philosophy department.
Be that as it may, the book sparkles with kernels of innovation and insight that become more technically developed in Whitehead’s later philosophy.16 Whitehead states that his object ‘is to lay the basis of a natural philosophy which is the necessary presupposition of a reorganized speculative physics’ (CN: x). But, he also takes pains to stress that he is not (yet) doing metaphysics but rather ‘endeavoring in these lectures to limit ourselves to nature itself and not to travel beyond entities which are disclosed in sense-awareness’ (CN: 19).
Given the topics of the discussion (space, time, and so on) it can be difficult to see how Whitehead can maintain he is not doing metaphysics, a difficulty he recognises: ‘it is difficult for a philosopher to realise that anyone really is confining his discussion within the limits that I have set before you. The boundary is set up just where he is beginning to get excited’ (CN: 32). What are these limits and what do they tell us about the implications of the problem Whitehead is constructing? His topic is nature, defined as ‘that which we observe in perception through the senses …[in which] we are aware of something which is not thought and which is self-contained for thought’ (CN: 2). The limit involves not asking about the perceiver or process of perception, but only the perceived (CN: 20). What is really perceived? This would appear to be a kind of phenomenology. Nevertheless, its implications go beyond phenomenology as well as appearing to go beyond the claimed limits of the text.
Whitehead’s fundamental claim is that ‘the concrete elements of nature [are] events’ (CN: 22) such that, even time and space are ‘abstractions’ from these concrete elements. This is to say that what is perceived, what is before us in perception, are events. As such, this is a radical empiricist claim. But Whitehead is concerned to think through, already, what this can mean for ordinary habits of thinking. He sets up two constraints that the speculative constructions of the later texts (eternal objects and actual occasions) endeavour to meet. Events as the concrete elements of nature require two modes of transition. One we might call global – the ‘passing of nature, its development, its creative advance’ and the second local – ‘the extensive relation between events’ (CN: 23). It is these two ‘facts’ and their relation that must be explained in a coherent philosophy of nature. To use a physical analogy – the train passes along the track, within the train, passengers participate in overlapping, but not equivalent, events of personal perception. Both events are entangled in each other.
This looks a lot like metaphysics. Whitehead’s refusal of that term is an effort to create a hesitation so that what he is endeavouring to bring into view is not immediately enlisted into categories already established (chiefly matter and mind as oppositional categories). Indeed, he is at once subtly criticising these terms but not (yet) offering a replacement. This is where the bifurcation of nature becomes so important, precisely because it operates according to the self-evidence of categories that Whitehead believes function against a real reckoning with the events of sense perception and nature.
Given the topic of the lecture series and Whitehead’s professional context, the bifurcation can be read as primarily an epistemic difficulty for a unified philosophy of the physical sciences. This framing is ultimately insufficient for emphasising its most pertinent existential and experiential effects, but it can be used as an entrance. As epistemic difficulty, the bifurcation involves an inconsistency within the paradigm of the natural sciences taken to be ‘concerned with the adventures of material entities in space and time’ (CN: 11).17 Defining the natural sciences in this way presumes the cogency of a concept of matter that is already separate from phenomenal experience of it. Since the natural sciences endorse empirical observation as privileged means of verification, there is at least a constitutive tension, if not outright incoherence: why would an empiricist orientation, which purportedly grounds all ideas in sensational experience, generate an ontology that undercuts the reality of nearly all of the qualitative features of this experience? As Whitehead asks, ‘Why should we perceive secondary qualities? It seems an extremely unfortunate arrangement that we should perceive a lot of things that are not there. Yet this is what the theory of secondary qualities in fact comes to’ (CN: 27).
Whitehead summarises the problem:
What I am essentially protesting against is the bifurcation of nature into two systems of reality, which, in so far as they are real, are real in different senses. One reality would be the entities such as electrons which are the study of speculative physics. This would be the reality which is there for knowledge, although on this theory it is never known. For what is known is the other sort of reality, which is the byplay of mind. Thus there would be two natures, one is the conjecture and the other is the dream. (CN: 21)18
An account of nature cannot begin from a presumption of a categorical (and unexplained) difference between disparate events of perception that provide access to presumed material entities of nature: ‘there is but one nature, namely the nature that is before us in perceptual knowledge’ (CN: 27). This is not to say that perceptual ‘knowledge’ exhausts nature, but it does establish a constraint: events of sense perception must themselves be understood as consistent with what will be called nature. To fail this constraint would be to install a disjunction that sets up oppositions (between mind and matter, for example) as given when they are in fact abstracted from a more inclusive experience: ‘we may not pick and choose . . . the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain the phenomenon’ (CN: 20).
Given Whitehead’s language of ‘two systems of reality’, the bifurcation might also be read as a metaphysical dualism. Yet, understanding the bifurcation in this way misses the experiential depth of the diagnosis and makes Whitehead’s later metaphysical innovations appear more arbitrary than they are. As Didier Debaise argues, understanding the bifurcation as equivalent to dualism in effect mistakes an effect for a cause. Dualism names a result produced by the operation of bifurcation. This operation takes what is experienced in a mode of togetherness and bifurcates it through abstractive analysis. The bifurcation occurs in experience and produces experiential effects (Debaise 2017b: 24–5). Conflating this operation with a metaphysical position (dualism) reinforces the idea of an external vantage, as if the thinker is selecting from possible puzzle solutions, when instead what is at stake is the manner in which bifurcation structures living experience. Indeed, bifurcation, as mode of abstraction, is so entrenched it is no longer perceived as operation. Its experiential effects are rendered given rather than produced, displaying the power of bifurcation to produce effects that reinforce its operation.
Bifurcation is a fallacy when it forgets that what it splits was experienced together: ‘The nature which is in fact apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, the feel of the velvet’ (CN: 21). Paradoxically, bifurcation of nature generates a division between ‘conjectured’ reasons for qualities of experience that are taken as more real: ‘The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature.’ When reified and read back into experience, greenness and warmth are relegated to lesser status of the merely ‘subjective’. A conjecture of reason (molecules and electrons) is privileged and felt experience is downgraded to the epiphenomenal. At certain theoretical extremes, these felt aspects are dismissed in the name of ‘hard’ science. The potential for a reinforcing feedback loop is enormous: if certain qualities are deemed less real, there is a tacit implication that they are less important to attend to. This can alter attention in experience.
The bifurcation is a paradigmatic instance of the power of abstraction to produce lived effects. This is not categorically bad. In many respects what Whitehead’s philosophy offers is a pragmatics of abstraction. Debaise writes ‘inquiry into the mode of existence of abstractions and their function in the most concrete experiences . . . is fundamental to the philosophy of Whitehead’ (2017b: 23). In the case of the bifurcation, the effects of the abstraction fail on both epistemic and existential grounds. Indeed, the bifurcation, for reasons sketched above, is doomed to necessarily reduce experience because it enables a dismissal of attention without providing a coherent reason for it. It is a presupposition about experience that orders how we prioritise observation that cannot itself be explained in observation. Worse, it is in direct tension with the felt intuition that: ‘by due attention, more can be found in nature than that which is observed at first sight’ (CN: 20). By prioritising certain aspects of observation and dismissing others, its effects are not only manifest in relations to phenomenal or qualitative experience, but even in how we conceptualise ourselves. Impoverishing the perceived potentials of attention, these effects alienate the subject from implications of their lived experience, especially at intuitive, felt, and embodied levels.
Diagnosing bifurcation as operation of abstraction might suggest seeking its resolution in the non-abstract, a call for a return to concrete experience as it really is, unmediated by abstraction. This is emphatically not Whitehead’s strategy. Such a call does not understand the constructive nature of experience. Abstraction, in some form, is a constitutive operation of experience. The resolution cannot be to erase it as such, but rather become more critical about its activity. Whitehead observes, ‘You cannot think without abstractions; accordingly, it is of the utmost importance to be vigilant in critically revising your mode of abstraction’ (SMW: 59).19 The very necessity of abstractions makes understanding their function imperative. Abstractions are not ‘things’ that lay over experience, they are activities that occur as partially constitutive modes of experience that shape it: ‘abstractions are neither representations nor generalizations of empirical states of affairs but constructions’ (Debaise 2017b: 23).
Despite Whitehead’s affinity with the many twentieth-century critiques of metaphysical dualism (whether eco-feminist (Val Plumwood and others) Deweyan, Bergsonian, or phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty)), what is required is not just criticism but deeper study of its production so as to construct a different way out of this problem. Critiques of dualism as such tempt a mere switching of priority of the poles or assimilation of one pole into the other (hence the idealism-materialism dialectic that post-Cartesian, post-Kantian philosophy remains captured by). But the need for an alternative construction is not readily granted. Die-hard proponents of the bifurcation may be too satisfied with its power to see need for an alternative abstraction. If you don’t already value the greenness of the foliage then why do you care about its loss? Are we not mistaking an axiological question for a physical one? Isn’t it indeed the case that the greenness of the leaves is not in the leaves at all? And yet the (presumed vicious) circularity cuts both ways. If the critic of bifurcation is charged with question-begging in presuming greenness is valuable, the enthusiastic bifurcator can also be charged with question-begging in presuming what is at stake is locating the substance bearer of the property of green-ness. Both sides in this sense are bifurcating. Evading the bifurcation cannot mean simply affirming the qualitative as epistemic end-in-itself, but nor can it be just accepting that extended material objects index mind-independent reality as such. Both are putting the cart before the horse by presuming that the problem, as commonly constructed, is already decisive.
In The Concept of Nature, Whitehead develops the possibility of an alternative abstraction for thinking about perception and reality: events.20 This conceptual shift performs a different operation of abstraction. The goal is an approach to experience that is rigorous, inclusive and attentive while avoiding the incoherence perpetuated by bifurcation. Because of the extent to which the bifurcation is taken for granted, the positing of an alternative abstraction must appear, at least at first, as speculative. However, while it is true that ultimately Whitehead goes much further in unfolding implications of this conceptual shift, its impetus remains experiential and can be situated in a lineage of radical empiricism.
Pure experience as series and events
A distinguishing characteristic of attention to the Deleuze/Whitehead intersection is its emphasis on alternative empiricisms.21 If the bifurcation shows how operations of abstraction can hinder, block or prefigure experiential attention, can we, to creatively paraphrase Samuel Beckett, ‘abstract again, abstract better’.22 Calling such a proposal empiricist names a commitment to experience as source and constraint for abstraction. Alternative abstraction must find its reasons for being in experience even as metaphysical innovations developed through such abstractions challenge the conventional standing of distinctions (between inner and outer or between self and world) inherent in ordinary concepts of experience.
I will explore this complementarity by focusing on William James’s concept of ‘pure experience’.23 James’s radical empiricism includes both an inclusive methodological orientation and a positive speculative proposal exemplified in the concept of pure experience. While the former is widely noted, it is the latter that is most important for understanding the linkage between James’s radical empiricism and the metaphysical turns to events developed in Whitehead and Deleuze.24
The methodological orientation of radical empiricism is most celebrated for its affirmation of continuities in experience. Following the postulate that ‘everything real must be experience-able somewhere, and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real’ (James 1976: 81), James challenges the atomistic emphasis of the British Associationist tradition since Hume.25 This tradition displays a phenomenological error common to ‘ordinary empiricism’ in: ‘do[ing] away with the connections of things, and . . . insist[ing] most on disjunctions’ (James 1976: 22–3). James insists instead that ‘… relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience’ (1976: 7, emphasis added).26 This demonstrates a commitment to inclusivity: there can be no in-principle dismissal of any aspect of experience (the vague, dull, obscure, felt or intensive, even the hallucinatory) as a priori less than real. Whitehead exhibits this radical empiricist orientation in exclaiming:
we must appeal to evidence relating to every variety of occasion. Nothing can be omitted, experience drunk and experience sober, experience sleeping and experience waking, experience drowsy and experience wide-awake, experience self-conscious and experience self-forgetful, experience intellectual and experience physical, experience religious and experience skeptical, experience anxious and experience care-free, experience anticipatory and experience retrospective, experience happy and experience grieving, experience dominated by emotion and experience under self-restraint, experience in the light and experience in the dark, experience normal and experience abnormal. (AI: 226)
Such a methodological orientation alone is not however sufficient for understanding the full radicality of the concept ‘pure experience’. Though in part an invitation to perspicuous attention to experience in all its variability, confusion and ambiguity, its positive implications go well beyond such a call. Pure experience indeed names ‘the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories’ (James 1976: 46), but such immediacy does not certify determinative normative or epistemological purchase. The problem generating James’s proposal of pure experience is not simply a false description but the pervasiveness of ‘vicious intellectualism’ in structuring the lens through which the descriptive emerges.27 The proposal of pure experience thus indicates the complexity of intersection between the immediate flux and the concepts through which it is described. It is not that certain concepts are ‘false’ and pure experience names the true, rather, pure experience is a gesture towards renewed attention to the real that illuminates a conceptual problem hidden in ordinary modes of description.
Specifically, James is inspecting the conceptual polarity between subject and object. In pure experience, he stresses ‘there is no self-splitting into consciousness and what consciousness is “of.” Its subjectivity and objectivity are functional attributes solely, realized only when the experience is “taken,” i.e., talked-of’ (James 1976: 13). While James emphasises how pure experience shifts conceptualisations of consciousness, the shift is not exclusively internal to subjectivity or consciousness. If it were, then pure experience would be a strategic device for phenomenological purposes, continuous with James’s earlier work in Principles of Psychology. Pure experience might then get us to look more closely at internal consciousness, but entirely within the framework of the subject/object distinction as fundamental.
James goes much further than this in Essays in Radical Empiricism. Pure experience is explicitly presented in speculative metaphysical terms in which ‘we start with the supposition that there is only one primal stuff . . . in the world . . . of which everything is composed, and . . . we call that stuff “pure experience,”’ (James 1976: 4). With this supposition, polarities of subjectivity and objectivity are not naming fundamental ontological substances or categories, but rather functions of relations between different moments of pure experience. Consciousness does not name ‘an aboriginal stuff or quality of being . . . out of which are thoughts are made’, rather, it is a name for a ‘function in experience’ (James 1976: 4). Rather than a res cogito, the mental as substantially different in kind, pure experience implies a shift to relational events as ontologically primary. Knowing is a kind of event, ‘a particular sort of relation . . . into which portions of pure experience may enter’ (James 1976: 4).
Given James’s emphasis on consciousness and the knowing-relation, it is often missed that he extends this suggestion to both ‘minds’ and ‘objects’. Just as mental events express particular sorts of relations within the broader category of pure experience (which, recall, is inclusive of all reality), material objects are also ‘processes’ of relations within this category. This is apparent in his response to the problem of doubling posed by standard accounts of mental representation. Perception appears to produce a doubling: there is one physical object and one’s perception of it as a mental representation. This is the basic ‘dualism’ of experience, resulting in ‘the paradox that what is evidently one reality should be in two places at once both in outer space and in a person’s mind’ (James 1976: 8).
James proposes that pure experience ‘reinterprets’ this dualism – there is still a dualism, but it no longer revolves around a fundamental ontological gap between two different substances. Rather, it is what might be called a local or situational dualism in which the ‘same’ ‘bit of experience’ can play dual roles depending on context (James 1976: 8). Instead of one ‘mysterious and elusive’ fundamental gap, there are now multiple gaps of relations or perspectives within one inclusive metaphysical category of pure experience. The bits of pure experience are events or processes, not self-standing things:
The puzzle of how the one identical room can be in two places is at bottom just the puzzle of how one identical point can be on two lines. It can, if it be situated at their intersection; and similarly, if the ‘pure experience’ of the room were a place of intersection of two processes, which connected it with different groups of associates respectively . . . (James 1976: 8)
The ‘reader’s personal biography’ as one series of events intersects with another series of events (‘carpentering, papering, furnishing, etc.’) (James 1976: 9–10).
This shifting in the terms of the problem leads Whitehead to compare James’s 1904 ‘Does Consciousness Exist?’ to Descartes’s Discourse on Method in announcing ‘the inauguration of a new stage in philosophy’ that ‘clear[s] the stage of the old paraphernalia’ (SMW: 143). Rather than explaining a relation between two categorically different substances, we now have to explain relevant distinctions between different kinds of event relations. The first problem follows a logic of exclusive disjunction and determinate negation, the second may follow a logic of degrees. Some relations will be more ‘mental’ than others, some will be more ‘physical’ than others, but we do not presume that these descriptions mark all-or-nothing sets of opposing substances. Instead, they mark tendencies, degrees, as James puts it: ‘relations are of different degrees of intimacy’ (1976: 23).
This shift is still not widely understood. As Whitehead says, if James ‘open[s] an epoch by clear formulation of terms in which thought could profitably express itself’ (SMW: 147), the profits of that thought are still in the making.28 Most radically, stressing the speculative posit of pure experience allows for an empiricist orientation without the necessity of a categorical subject. Challenging the idea that experience is necessarily a predicate of a pre-existent subject, this speculative posit flies in the face of convention. One task of the present text is showing why it is worth the risks to explore such a paradoxical notion as asubjective experience. This requires more sustained investigation into metaphysics without presuming the indubitability of the subjective/objective pivot as necessary starting point.
This alternative to beginning from categorical opposition and determinate negation attracts Jean Wahl, a notable early French reader of James and Whitehead and influence on Deleuze.29 A consistent feature of Wahl’s reading is his interest in how a radical empiricism keeps the concrete immediacy of experience as vital and open while not necessarily falling prey to the Hegelian critique of the immediacy of the ‘here’ and ‘now’.30 As such, Wahl aligns himself with ‘realism’ rather than the quasi-Hegelian idealisms prominent in his milieu, but this realism is understood as closely aligned with pluralism. This is first demonstrated in how Wahl’s 1920 Les Philosophies pluralists d’Angleterre et d’Amérique links the implications of radical empiricism to a pluralistic realism.31 Wahl consistently emphasises the connection between radical empiricism and metaphysics as the most important aspect of James thought: ‘“pragmatism” regarded as the consideration of precise consequences, is but the logical result of that whereof pluralism is the metaphysical result’ (Wahl 1925: 117).32
Wahl’s interest in the way that James (and by extension Whitehead) provides a different approach to experience is further demonstrated in his 1932 study Vers le Concret.33 Here, Wahl argues that James and Whitehead offer a genuine third way that resists the recoil between idealism and realism structuring the thought of his milieu.34 This recoil is oriented by a Hegelian logic of determinate negation wielded in a dialectic between thought and world with an ultimate goal of arrival, through thought, at the absolute. Wahl wants a realism that is not reductive or easily captured by the Hegelian critique of ‘immediacy’. Pure experience attracts him insofar as it enables such a realism. The key is that attention to pure experience reveals events as a ‘mixture of the continuous and the discontinuous that defines a rhythm, a volume, a person’ (Wahl 2017: 37). This is ‘precisely what [Whitehead, James] grasp . . . blocks of duration, volumes, events’ (Wahl 2017: 37, emphasis added). If ‘these philosophers [James and Whitehead] claim the rights of the immediate’, it is an immediacy of events that come in different degrees of intensity and intimacy. Rather than the here and now taken as complete in itself, there is a ‘density’ in the concrete characterised as a mixture of tendencies (the continuous and the discontinuous enveloped in one another) (Wahl 2017: 48–9). It is this tension, between a desire to maintain contact with an extra-conceptual real and a recognition that it inherently slips from grasp as soon as we say anything about it – that attracts Wahl to James, and that sets what Wahl will still call a ‘dialectic’ in a different direction. As Wahl writes, ‘The concrete will never be something given to the philosopher . . . [but] it will be what is being pursued’ (2017: 51).
Pure experience thus brings into view a different kind of dynamic realism, one whose pluralism challenges stable identity fixed independently of perspective that is a feature of many ‘common sense’ realisms. This follows the above citation regarding how one ‘identical’ room can be in two places when conceptualised as relational event at the intersection of two (or more) different series of events. In the context of evading a single categorical gap between mind and world, the event posit includes both minds and world as abstractions constructed out of processes and events. This raises the possibility of an excess to any particular relation-event-experience, since, as James notes, it is ‘a member of diverse processes that can be followed away from it along entirely different lines’ (James 1976: 8). There is the ongoing room event in the material series of the history of the wood, not to mention the many room events all occurring along the series of the personal histories of its occupants. And these continue to happen, in principle. Deleuze, for example, alludes to James in declaring that ‘… perspectivism amounts to a relativism, but not the relativism we take for granted. It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject’ (Deleuze 1993: 20). When experience is the juncture of lines of functions any ‘point’ (a point of view in a particular place at a particular time) is an intersection of many different lines (or series, in Deleuze’s language).
Rather than subjective relativism, James’s radical empiricism implies a perspectival realism. The relativity in question is not only relative to one fixed pole (the subject) but is rather multiplied into relativities at any number of potential loci of experience. This will be more rigorously developed in Whitehead, but already in James there is a multiplication of relational loci as different ‘elements’ of pure experience. This perspectival relationality complicates determinate negation’s operation on two-term relations. Events are instead relationally promiscuous. This promiscuity remains a problem for formal logical syntax (of which Whitehead is well aware), because, with some exceptions, event relations can only be reductively described in two terms. But the radical empiricist orientation affirms this multiplicity as intrinsic to experience. The burden of multiplicity’s challenge lies on the side of formal syntax, not a denial of the reality or relevance of this promiscuity.
As Wahl recognises, the multiplicity of experience indicates a paradox: a concrete experience is at once irreducibly precise and yet cannot be characterised with discrete precision. What Wahl proposes, and what he sees in James and Whitehead and passes on to Deleuze, is an image of a dialectic of thought that is not just unfolding conceptual oppositions, but that is always attempting to move in relation to something that is not thought. The dynamism of thinking is not internal alone but is rather an expression of a processual reality: ‘Movement is not immanent to the idea [alone] . . . [rather] it comes from what the idea tries to do in relation to something other than itself’ (Wahl 2017: 51, emphasis added). Deleuze characterises this as Wahl’s commitment to difference: ‘All of Jean Wahl’s work is a profound meditation on difference . . . [and] the irreducibility of the different to the simple negative; on the non-Hegelian relations between affirmation and negation’ (DR: 311, n18). The influence of Wahl’s reading of James on Deleuze cannot be overstated. Indeed, Deleuze is entirely Wahlian in declaring that radical empiricism ‘presents only events’ (WIP: 47–8, emphasis added).
James’s suggestions are however by no means fully conclusive. Whitehead observes that James has not fully disambiguated the distinction of entity and function, since in one way ‘the notion of “entity” is so general that it may be taken to mean anything that can be thought about’ (SMW: 144). If the primary obligation of empiricism is taken to be establishing definitive epistemic criteria, then pure experience seems fated to entail a subjective relativism in any practical sense. Even if there are no longer two metaphysical substances to be traversed, because the ‘same’ element can be determined in different ways from different perspectives, the practical consequence is a subjective relativism. This has been a major concern and it remains the case that problematising fixed identity is often conflated with relativisms or anti-realisms.35 To see the radical empiricist shifting of the terms of the problem (from substances to processes and events) as a realism, we have to examine pure experience as a metaphysical posit, not exclusively a phenomenological device. This posit intensifies the intersection between lived experiences of individuality and abstractions through which this experience is conceptualised.
Realism and asubjective experience
James’s description of pure experience as ‘primal stuff . . . of which everything is composed’ is apt to be misunderstood in two ways. The first follows the extent to which the language of ‘stuff’ is easily read through a substance metaphysical paradigm. Consider Bertrand Russell’s description of pure experience as a ‘neutral monism’: ‘James . . . advocate[s] . . . “neutral monism”, according to which the material of the world is constructed neither of mind or matter, but something anterior to both’ (Russell 1961: 767–8, emphasis added). On the one hand, Russell’s description of pure experience as prior to mind and matter logically is clearly correct and consistent with implications also noted by David Lapoujade’s Deleuze-inspired reading. In beginning from ‘a field in which experience is virtually subjective or objective, indifferently mental or physical, but also primitively neither one nor the other’, pure experience is free from ‘the categories with which it is traditionally partitioned’ (Lapoujade 2000: 193).36 But everything depends on how we understand the status of this monism. Russell’s language of ‘material’ is easily assimilated into an underlying metaphysics of substance. While he is right that pure experience is anterior to both mind and matter, he still suggests this primal stuff as a kind of ‘third substance’ – some unforeseen prime element. This does not track the way James characterises ‘stuff’ in terms of relational events. In this regard, it would be more accurate to describe pure experience as do-ing or happen-ing prior to the sorting of happen-ings into contrasting types: mind or matter.
The second misunderstanding hangs on the language of neutrality and purity. Does neutrality or purity name a universal and homogeneous essence? Purity understood in this sense encourages a collective approach where pure experience is the set of all the pure elements that make up a reality finished and closed. The neutrality and purity of this monism entail a homogeneity at the ‘elemental’ level. This collective approach is contrasted with a distributive approach that understands pure experience as open and to a certain extent contingent. The ‘elements’ of pure experience do not share a common qualitative form and are not determined in a single ‘neutral’ way. Their purity does not name a universal homogeneity, despite the language of ‘primal stuff’.
James has this latter sense in mind when he stresses ‘… there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made. There are as many stuffs as there are “natures” in the things experienced’ (1976: 14, emphasis added). James denies collective homogeneity: pure experience is not an undifferentiated goop. This distributive notion emphasises open contingency. Events of pure experience do not necessarily follow a single principle of determination that can be ascertained outside of pure experience itself. This does not resolve epistemic or existential problems of differentiation, but it does establish a form for the problems. Accounting for individuated differences is not a single problem of designating connotation or picking out a particular element. Instead of one way to designate, there will be many, and they will depend on the relations and ‘natures’ in question.37
Pure experience thus intensifies the extent to which activity of identification is bound up with underlying metaphysical assumption. James’s descriptions of pure experience in relation to ‘newborn babes’ and ‘men in semicoma’ (1976: 45) is misleading if it encourages a psychological conception only – as if pure experience were an indiscriminate chaos that results from failure to organise reality. Such a psychological read begs the question in presuming the ordering of pure experience happens automatically and universally. This presumption is enabled when pure experience is merely an indeterminate flux full-stop. The metaphysical question of differentiation thus hangs on the status of potential and actual relations inherent in pure experience, with identification and differentiation akin to processes of actualisation.
It is true that pure experience presents an immediate flux in which there is not yet subject or object as such. However, to say that it is ‘pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what’ (James 1976: 46) does not mean it lacks any direction or relation whatsoever. Instead, pure experience is seething with difference and relation, but these relations have not been ordered categorically. These relations are not yet determinate, but they are determinable. They are ‘ready to be all sorts of whats; full both of oneness and of manyness’ but they are not yet ‘caught’ (James 1976: 46). The ‘prepositions, copulas, and conjunctions’ that ‘flower out of the stream of pure experience’ and then ‘melt into it again’ are not arbitrary inventions. It is not that anything goes, because pure experience is not a neutral homogeneous whole but rather an in-process network of relational moments. Lapoujade alludes to this using Deleuze’s ‘patchwork’ metaphor, ‘The textile matter of pure experience is composite . . . it consists of fragments linked to each other in different ways’ (2000: 196). A metaphysics of pure experience thus affirms an empiricist orientation: because experiential events are connected through active relational transitions that remain contingent, there is no substitute or replacement for continued attention to the events of experience.
This is not an answer to the question of determination. As both Whitehead and Deleuze develop it, the metaphysics of differentiation requires going beyond the constraints of a narrow empiricism. The question though is how. Rather than reductive opposition between rationalist and empiricist, with both representing opposing ‘positions’ complete in themselves (either universal predetermined principles of identification or identities given in toto in experience), there is need of both principles and experience. But this coupling of principles and experience is itself relationally emergent and contingent. This is why emphasising pure experience as a metaphysical posit exceeds the explicitly phenomenological. The determination of the object or identity in question is not simply given at the level of pure experience because determination is a processual event. The crucial innovation is pure experience’s determinable but not determinate distinction. This distinction is not only epistemic – if it were, we would be back at the psychological reading in assuming that objects in themselves are determined ontologically, but not at the psychic level. Pure experience would then refer only to pre-processed perceptual information before achieving a cognitive representation matching the objective determination in reality. I am suggesting that this determinable but not determinate distinction is metaphysical, not only psychological. In this sense, determination as actualisation refers to ontological processes that exceed human perception alone.
Emphasising pure experience as metaphysical posit with a determinable but not determinate structure sets basic criteria for the projects of both Deleuze and Whitehead. As already stressed, because events of pure experience cannot be determinatively prefigured, these projects remain empiricist in orientation. This orientation is particularly relevant for thinking existential effects. While both Deleuze and Whitehead exceed empiricism narrowly construed in constructing metaphysical concepts that cannot be directly verified, these concepts never preclude the need for continued attention to a reality that remains open and contingent. This existential orientation is correlative with what Deleuze calls ‘the secret of empiricism’. Rather than ‘simple appeal to lived experience’, empiricism is a ‘mak[ing], remak[ing] and unmak[ing]’ of concepts ‘along a moving horizon’: ‘the concept as object of an encounter’ not a universal a priori (DR: xx).
Reading the determinable but not determinate structure as metaphysical – not only psychological or phenomenological – introduces the necessity of a transcendental level, in roughly but not precisely the Kantian sense of conditions for the possibility of experience. Most notably, for neither thinker is it necessary for this transcendental level to be exclusively threaded through the locus of a determinate human subject or ego, whether empirical or transcendental. While Whitehead acknowledges Kant’s importance in ‘introducing . . . the conception of an act of experience as a constructive functioning’, he inverts the direction of Kant’s analysis (PR: 156). Whitehead writes: ‘for Kant the process whereby there is experience is a process from subjectivity to apparent objectivity’ (PR: 156). Kant’s transcendental deduction thus seeks to discover the necessary conditions that govern the construction of objective experience. In doing so, Kant ‘presupposes a subject which then encounters a datum . . . and then reacts to that datum’ (PR: 155).38 For Whitehead, however, there is not a pre-existent subject constructing an objective experience, there is, rather, a real external and objective world out of which a process achieves subjective experience. He thus seeks to ‘explain[s] the process as proceeding from objectivity to subjectivity, namely, from the objectivity, whereby the external world is a datum, to the subjectivity, whereby there is one individual experience’ (PR: 156). The function of the transcendental is thereby shifted. Though Whitehead still seeks to think how reality must be to explain subjective experience, his categories, both transcendental (‘eternal objects’) and actual (‘actual occasions’), are not restricted to human perspective alone.
Whitehead’s inversion bears some similarity to what Deleuze refers to as a ‘transcendental empiricism’ that seeks to uncover the ‘conditions of real experience, and not only of possible experience’ (DR: 285). Such transcendental empiricism also departs from the presupposition that these conditions must go through a unified transcendental subject. Both Deleuze and Whitehead see Kant as reducing experience to representational cognition, precisely because, as Whitehead puts it ‘Kant’s act of experience is essentially knowledge [such that] whatever is not knowledge is necessarily inchoate and merely on its way to knowledge’ (PR: 155). This emphasis on knowledge leads Kant to only grant extensive and representative features of experience and privilege the form of identity as a necessity for coherence. This denies pervasive features of real experience: sensible, affective and intensive qualities that Deleuze refers to as ‘the lived reality of a sub-representative domain’ (DR: 69).39
By only granting extensive and representative features of experience as those that lead to ‘knowledge’, Kant’s tracing of the conditions of possible experience is not truly transcendental. This is why Deleuze states that he seeks conditions of real rather than possible experience. If the conditions of real experience are traced off cognitive representations, as in Kant, then there is a risk of a reductive circle that blocks the full intensity of sensible encounters by ensuring that their results must fit into categories of extensive representation. This allows a perceived epistemic requirement (and Deleuze is most worried about the necessity of identity over time) to constrain what we grant in experience. It hinders attention to the real by prejudging what counts as viable and results in a failure to respond to what is primary in experience, namely, difference:
Empiricism truly becomes transcendental . . . only when we apprehend directly in the sensible that which can only be sensed, the very being of the sensible: difference, potential difference, and difference in intensity as the reason behind qualitative diversity. (DR: 56–7)
Understanding the determinable but not determinate structure as metaphysical shows the constructions of Deleuze and Whitehead to be varieties of nonstandard realisms, provided we accept a gap between ordinary representations of reality and processes constitutive of these representations. Such a realism does not map onto affirmations of the objective as statically given. Both construct metaphysics that are realist in rejecting the necessity of a human subject, but also perspectival. This perspectivism is not only epistemic, it is rather a feature of the genesis of the real – what Deleuze would characterise as a ‘differential’ genesis. In this way, we might think of their work as affirming objective relativism provided we relinquish the notion of the human subject and the material object as stable and fixed pivots. This also requires giving up the idea that experience is necessarily a predicate of an experiencer.
Such moves challenge habits of lived individuality. What could it mean to affirm lived experience not necessarily tied to an experiencer? This question requires working to understand the conceptual innovations necessary for its coherence and translating these innovations into terms of living experience –while remaining mindful that available language for this translation is in pervasive tension with the vision being articulated. We are now better prepared however to understand why someone would risk this challenge, as well as some of its first steps. Avoiding a bifurcation of nature is not primarily a matter of resolving the epistemic status of different kinds of knowledge, but rather a project of creating conceptual conditions by which we might learn to rehabilitate living experience. If such creation remains speculative and experimental under current conditions, its goal is not idle speculation. As Stengers puts it, metaphysics is ‘an experimental practice like physics . . . it devises concepts that will have no meaning unless they succeed in bringing into existence those dimensions of experience that usual statements can ignore’ (Stengers 2011: 248). The speculative concept must connect with reality even as it challenges ordinary habits of perceiving that reality.
Notes
1. I cite Deleuze’s reference to these dialectical turns without assessing their legitimacy.
2. Kant repeats this phrase no less than four times in the first two pages of the B Preface alone.
3. Whitehead’s ‘propositional lures’ or ‘lures for feeling’ reflect how different ideals inform the ongoing constitution of actual reality. Such ‘lures’, which may be conceptual, ethical, emotional, and so on, help to order the process by which an actual occasion becomes determinate (PR: 185–6).
4. Whitehead’s full quotation reads: ‘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’ (PR: 4).
5. Emphasis on the problem extends from Deleuze’s first monograph on Hume through the metaphysical texts of the late 1960s and the co-authored work with Guattari. His reading of the history of philosophy is oriented around problems rather than positions, in contrast to ‘histories . . . in which solutions are reviewed without ever determining what the problem is . . . since the problem is only copied from the propositions that serve as its answer’ (WIP: 80).
6. This paragraph closely follows Le Doeuff’s reading in The Philosophical Imaginary.
7. Given Kant’s socio-political context of increasing European colonialism as well as his prominence in articulating racist hierarchies as justification for such conquest, we might well ask if Kant’s language of possession or his scorn for those useless nomads are easily dismissed as merely inept metaphors.
8. Kant’s privileging of work over play indicates a valuation that is not obviously universal. Deleuze’s own inclusion of puns and wordplay are a performative challenge to this image of ‘real’ thought, which, as he reminds us, is a moral image. This tension remains in the norms of professionalised philosophy and Deleuze alludes to it discussing Whitehead’s relative lack of attention in 1987: ‘Whitehead is read by a handful of enthusiasts and another handful of professionals. Like Bergson as well . . . one is unable to say whether or not it is “serious” stuff’ (http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=140&groupe=Leibniz&langue=1 (my translation)).
9. Whitehead’s schools resonate with P. F. Strawson’s well-known distinction between ‘revisionary’ and ‘descriptive’ metaphysics. Where the former ‘is concerned to produce a better structure [of thought about the world]’, the latter wants only to describe the currently existing structure. Strawson observes that this distinction is imperfect insofar as ‘no actual metaphysician has ever been, both in intention and effect, wholly the one or the other’ (1959: xiii). That said, both Whitehead and Deleuze clearly emphasise the revisionary.
10. Compare this with Whitehead’s claim in PR: ‘in the real world it is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true’ (PR: 259). This is further developed in Modes of Thought, where Whitehead focuses on Importance, Interest and Perspective to complicate positivistic epistemologies. See especially MT: 1–19, 21.
11. Whitehead distinguishes between Aristotle’s own philosophy and the influence of his logic: ‘The dominance of Aristotelian logic from the late classical period onwards has imposed on metaphysical thought the categories naturally derivative from its phraseology. This dominance of his logic does not seem to have been characteristic of Aristotle’s own metaphysical speculations’ (PR: 30).
12. This terminology comes from Guattari’s The Three Ecologies. See Chapter 5.
13. This worry (along with an insistence on a framing opposition between idealism and materialism) drives a constellation of critiques of Deleuze, especially Hallward 2006 and Žižek 2004. Badiou’s critique of Deleuze as a ‘thinker of the One’ is also in the same conceptual universe.
14. This inaugurates Whitehead’s habit of naming constitutive fallacies: the ‘fallacy of simple location’ (SMW) ‘fallacy of misplaced concreteness’ (SMW) the ‘evolutionist fallacy’ (FR) and so on.
15. Stengers follows Lewis Ford in locating a leap in Whitehead’s thought between The Concept of Nature (1920) and Science and the Modern World (1925). Deleuze’s most extended remarks on Whitehead, both in print (Le Pli) or in his 1987 seminar, draw extensively on The Concept of Nature. It is worth nothing that this text did not appear in French until 2006. During Deleuze’s life, the following works were available in French translation: Science and the Modern World (French version published in 1930); Religion in the Making (French version published in 1926); and The Function of Reason and Other Essays (French version published in 1969). This last text includes what is published separately as Symbolism in English, as well as Nature and Life, two lectures also included in Modes of Thought. It appears likely that much of Deleuze’s access to Whitehead would have come through Jean Wahl, who unlike Deleuze was fluent in English.
16. This is not to say that Whitehead’s discussion of events in Concept of Nature is equivalent to his metaphysical construction of the actual occasion. Debaise argues that conflation of ‘actual occasion’ as equivalent to an experiential event stems from Deleuze (Debaise 2017b: 54–5, 62 n13; for an example, see Shaviro 2014). To be sure, in his most extended engagement with Whitehead in The Fold, Deleuze does not acknowledge this distinction, solely using the term ‘event’ (1993 [1988]: 76–82).
17. Whitehead’s criticism of conceiving matter as an entity discretely located in space and time runs throughout his work. His criticism makes his work relevant to ‘new materialisms’ of recent years, many of which take inspiration from Deleuze. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write, one aspect of this new materialism is its rejection of matter imagined as a ‘massive opaque plenitude’ and instead a conception of matter as ‘indeterminate, constantly forming and reforming in new ways’ (2010: 10). However, such new materialisms, many of them feminist in orientation, wrestle in much more substantive fashion with the political implications of this conception of matter, especially for lived phenomenological categories such as gender.
18. Whitehead’s bifurcation can be seen as a precursor to what has come to be known (following Chalmers) as the ‘hard problem of consciousness’ in contemporary philosophy of mind. For readings that engage this question using Whitehead see Shaviro 2014: 65–84; Basile 2018: 47–60.
19. Deleuze makes a similar point about the inescapeability of abstraction: ‘True lived experience is an absolutely abstract thing . . . I don’t live representation in my heart, I live a temporal line which is completely abstract. What is more abstract than a rhythm?’ (Cited in Atkins 2016: 355).
20. We might say that the ‘event’ is the nontechnical formulation of a basic shift and the ‘actual occasion’, as we will see, is the technical construction it motivates.
21. Examples include Debaise’s Speculative Empiricism 2017a; also Alliez 2004, Robinson 2009. Debaise notes the relation of ‘speculative empiricism’ with radical empiricism and pragmatism (2017a: 7–10) a point shared by Massumi’s usage of a ‘speculative pragmatism’ (2002, 2014). Besides James, varieties of radical empiricisms can also be found in Bergson, Peirce and F. W. J. Schelling, among others. The emphasis on empiricism departs from a rationalist emphasis in the tradition of process theology heavily influenced by Hartshorne. It is also by no means a consensus view in Deleuze scholarship. See Bryant 2008 and Kerslake 2009 for studies emphasising Deleuze’s complicated relationship with Kant and post-Kantian idealism rather than empiricism.
22. I refer to Beckett’s quip, since become cultural vernacular: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (1989: 89).
23. This is not intended as exclusive antecedent. Though James is important for both, his influence is by no means fully decisive.
24. One exception to this tendency to focus on the epistemological and methodological rather than the metaphysical is found in David Lamberth (1999).
25. This tradition was particularly prevalent in the emergence of psychology as a discipline, in which James was a leading figure. For a discussion of the Associationist tradition, see Young 1968. For an appraisal of James’s psychology as a response, see Klein 2009.
26. Whitehead adopts this Jamesian phenomenological critique in the Symbolism lectures but complicates the continuity of experience by distinguishing two modes of perception: causal efficacy and presentational immediacy (S: 31–2). This text is notable as a transition between the phenomenological and metaphysical. See also Faber et al. 2017.
27. Vicious intellectualism refers to a reification of conceptual distinctions that is then used to restrict experiential possibility: ‘The misuse of concepts begins with the habit of employing them privatively as well as positively, using them not merely to assign properties to things, but to deny the very properties with which the things sensibly present themselves’ (James 1977: 99).
28. Stengers describes Whitehead as desiring to confer upon James’s suggestions a more ‘rigid coherence’ in thinking through their implications ‘right to the end’ (Stengers 2014: 150). She cites Whitehead’s remark that ‘Every philosophical school . . . requires two presiding philosophers. One of them, under the influence of the main doctrines of the school, should survey experience with some adequacy, but inconsistently. The other philosopher should reduce the doctrines of the school to a rigid consistency’ (PR: 57).
29. In Deleuze’s words, his teacher Wahl: ‘… not only introduced us to an encounter with English and American thought, but he had the ability to make us think, in French, things that were very new’ (1987: 57–8). A significant figure in French philosophy in the early to mid-twentieth century, Wahl’s eclectic vision melds an existential orientation informed by Kierkegaard and Heidegger, German Idealism and Romanticism, and radical empiricism and process metaphysics. Recent years have seen renewal of interest in his work and two new translations. See Wahl 2016, 2017. For discussion of the influence on Deleuze, see Bowden et al. 2014; Madelrieux 2014; Zamberlin 2006.
30. This is presented most famously in the Phenomenology (see Hegel 1977 [1807]: 58–79).
31. This text was published in English translation in 1925 as Pluralist Philosophies of England and America.
32. In addition to departing from the emphasis on pragmatism as epistemological method, Wahl insists that radical empiricism leads to a realist pluralism. This departs from tendencies to read James’s pragmatism as either leading to, or following from, what is now called ‘anti-realism’. See, for example, Seigfried 1990.
33. This text, with a new preface by French scholar of pragmatism Mathias Girel, was reissued in 2004 by J. Vrin.
34. This interest follows Bergson’s critique in Matter and Memory of the way in which realisms and idealisms mirror each other in their presuppositions.
35. One trend within pragmatist scholarship is to portray this as a split between the ‘realist’ pragmatism of Peirce and the bad ‘subjectivism/relativism’ of James. See for example Misak 2013 (especially 51–73) who narrates pragmatism as a split between the hero Peirce and the well-intentioned but confused James.
36. A reading seconded by Jeffrey Bell, who sees James’s pure experience as analogous to Deleuze’s virtual (2009: 21).
37. This distributive approach also displays James’s manner of distinguishing between empiricism and rationalism: ‘empiricism means the habits of explaining wholes by parts, and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes’ (James 1977: 9). If identity is thought of as a conceptual whole, then the implication is that its qualities are not given in the concept but rather we must begin with these qualities (relations) in seeking to characterise the concept. This is why, for example, Deleuze states that ‘Relations are external to their terms. When James calls himself a pluralist, he does not say, in principle, anything else’ (Deleuze 1991: 99).
38. The datum corresponds to Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself (Ding an sich).
39. Observing that ‘Deleuze’s most general problem is not being but experience’, Zourabichvili explains that ‘experience’ does not designate only ordinary lived experience: ‘Transcendental empiricism means first of all that the discovery of the conditions of experience itself presupposes an experience in the strict sense: not the ordinary or empirical experience of a faculty (for the data of empirical lived experience doesn’t inform thought about what it can do), but this faculty taken to its limit, confronted by that which solicits it in its own unique power’ (Zourabichvili 2012: 210).