Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts by Isabelle Stengers (PDF)

Description

Alfred North Whitehead has never gone out of print, but for a time he was decidedly out of fashion in the English-speaking world. In a splendid work that serves as both introduction and erudite commentary, Isabelle Stengers―one of today’s leading philosophers of science―goes straight to the beating heart of Whitehead’s thought. The product of thirty years’ engagement with the mathematician-philosopher’s entire canon, this volume establishes Whitehead as a daring thinker on par with Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault.Reading the texts in broadly chronological order while highlighting major works, Stengers deftly unpacks Whitehead’s often complicated language, explaining the seismic shifts in his thinking and showing how he called into question all that philosophers had considered settled after Descartes and Kant. She demonstrates that the implications of Whitehead’s philosophical theories and specialized knowledge of the various sciences come yoked with his innovative, revisionist take on God. Whitehead’s God exists within a specific epistemological realm created by a radically complex and often highly mathematical language.“To think with Whitehead today,” Stengers writes, “means to sign on in advance to an adventure that will leave none of the terms we normally use as they were.”

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: About the Author Isabelle Stengers teaches philosophy of science at the Free University of Brussels.Bruno Latour is Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and the 2013 winner of the Ludvig Holberg International Memorial Prize.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Professor Stengers’ book is arguably as difficult to read as reading Whitehead himself, and it probably is not a good introduction for the uninitiated to this very important Twentieth-Century philosopher. Her language often is quite difficult to follow–possibly an artifact of the translation from the French–and her task is not to explain Whitehead’s system. Her self-imposed task is to “think with Whitehead” the problems that led him to write what he did as he began his post-retirement career in philosophy at Harvard. With a pre-existing knowledge of Whitehead in hand, Stengers’ book, which seems to be extensively researched, illuminates much about what motivated him and where he intended to go. This is useful. Whitehead was notoriously impatient with reworking his older writing in ways that would have made it clearer, he left no real documentation of how his thinking was changing, and even his magnum opus, “Process and Reality”, had to be revised and corrected by others after his death.Stengers begins with “The Concept of Nature” and shows how Whitehead sought to challenge what he terms the “bifurcation of nature”, which could be translated here as a kind of dualism: the modern tendency to separate objective, scientifically-measurable reality from subjective, aesthetic “feelings”, then reducing the latter to the former, effectively denying their reality. Whitehead is much more holistic than that. He extends this project in “Science and the Modern World”, where he introduces God as the concept of “limitation”, although perhaps it might be better to see God as the concept of integration of the wholeness of the cosmos. “Process and Reality” extends the vision of wholeness and integration, of “concrescence” and “feelings”, of “prehension” and “objective immortality” into a system that offers a vision of what all this might look like. As she thinks with Whitehead through the “problems” which led him to create his system she also shows how what he creates involves a truly religious vision (“Religion in the Making”) and how he saves values (there is no value apart from “actual occasions”) from the reduction that much of scientism, in collaboration with much of theology and even art, would allow. The tour of the development of Whiteheadian thinking extends through “Modes of Thought” and “Adventures of Ideas”.In the process Stengers convinced me that Whitehead had a truly religious vision, but “religion” in a form that could be called non-theism. Whitehead had no use for most of theology, and he probably would have been disturbed by the theology that some have made of his system. His God is not one who inspires worship so much as caring and concern. His task would have been, from his point of view, the making possible and justifying of the “enjoyment” of a sunset while affirming the meaningfulness of measuring the wavelengths of its light, both as part of the self-same movement toward a greater integration of reality. And his task was not so much the creation of an explanatory system for that reality to replace scientific or aesthetic knowing, but rather a vision of what the whole might be as it “lures” us toward it, as it lures the thinking of those who might follow him in his “adventure”. “Creativity” is the absolute for Whitehead, not God.As Whitehead is being rediscovered in the Twenty-First Century, this book is an important milestone in following where this “most amiable of philosophers” in the Twentieth Century points us.

⭐Ms. Stengers is a master teacher, and philosophy cannot exist if not for the teaching. To teach is a profound gesture of giving what one can, with no expectation of return, for the sake of something important that needs to be brought into the light of day so that it might take its place in people’s lives. Ms. Stengers has done that with Whitehead’s thought for me.I tried to read Process and Reality long ago, and the attempt fell flat. I am neither a mathematician, nor am I patient with anglo-analytical, positivist reductions of living things, and that is what I initially thought Whitehead was doing. I became curious again about Whitehead as others I was reading (Massumi, Manning) cited phrases of his that rang true. I picked up Stenger’s book on the chance that it might change my impression. It did.Stingers emphasizes Whitehead’s move from counting as ultimate “nature,” to counting as ultimate “creativity.” Every notion that Whitehead sets out, every “actual occasion” his writing elicits, in Stingers’ reading and teaching, becomes alive with “speculative efficacy.” Each occasion proposes its consequence as what can become viable in a proposition for engaging. While this is “pragmatic” in a Jamesian way, it is poetic and generative in its sense of giving, sharing and offering of an expression of what lies before us in the occasion.Stingers spends two big chapters on Whitehead’s evolving notion of God — a notion that I find largely superfluous for generative thinking. But, she makes the case that this notion of putting into play of the speculative efficacy, an act of faith, sets up the raw, unmitigated feeling of some factor that gives it the moment of existence, not matter what. A Platonic Khora? A cosmological constant? A Spinozan God? No matter. The point is that this giving of what is speculated becomes efficacious now and then; it does so not because we are such good crafters of the new, but because the more expansive and more encompassing open up to what we elect to care for.Stengers cares for thinking and for her readers, those who elect to think with her, and then with Whitehead.

⭐Whitehead demanded much of his readers. Those staying with him are always gratified and educated with his agile, probing, curious mind that ranged over so many subjects. Stengers brings him to life in some ways that make reading him more pleasant. Thank you for that.

⭐If you are seriously interested in Whitehead then read it. It is difficult to read and understand because she is linking her mind with Whitehead’s. What was he thinking when he wrote this? Why do I think this is what he was thinking? Do I (Stengers) agree? Because she is a Belgian philosopher some sources were unknown to me. In fact Stengers was someone I was not aware of in philosophy. Yet it is always helpful to know of new scholars. The Foreword by Bruno Latour was insightful.Mac McPherson

⭐If there are two books on modern philosophical thought that someone must read, along with “The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas that Have Shaped Our World View” by Richard Tarnas, this book of Isabelle Stengers is the second one!It is an extraordinary work in every sense. The reader is indeed thinking with Whitehead -as if he was in his living room along with Isabelle Stengers. Exactly: thinking *with* and not *about* Whitehead.The book is lively, deep, well researched and a jewel for philosophical writing.Minds who cannot but think are definitely going to be enriched in many levels after this reading.Well done Isabelle Stengers, excellent translation Michael Chase, very important foreword Bruno Latour.Thanks to all of you.

⭐If you are an academic and a scholar of Whitehead you will love this work. I have read articles by Stengers over the years and now have a whole collection

⭐A pretentious book that is more about Stengers than Whitehead. It will not teach the reader much about Whitehead’s philosophy; it reads more as a large poem that abstractedly expresses Stengers’ appreciation of the great man.

⭐Very good introduction to the philosophy of Whitehead.

⭐A great book – the BEST help with Whitehead

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