Thinking with Whitehead A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts by Stengers, Isabelle [Harvard UP,2011]

by Isabelle Stengers

Thinking with Whitehead A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts by Stengers, Isabelle. Published by Harvard UP,2011, Hardcover

Genres: Philosophy, Reference

Hardcover

First published January 1, 2002

About the author

Isabelle Stengers is the author of many books on the philosophy of science, and is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.

Reviews

[Ted Morgan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alfred North Whitehead was a mathematician and a mathematical physicist who read mathematics at university. He presented a counter interpretation to Einstein's physics that I understand has not endured comparison with Einstein. He was a mathematician who attempted to establish a logical foundation for mathematics but failed. He came to speculative thought I believe after the shock of the First World War and the loss of his son, an airman, in combat.

I recall a remark about hearing words used in "a customary way" then hearing them used in ways that upset one's customary ways of understating language. Whitehead was not a theologian though he bought a parson's theological library of around 300 books, read the books, and then sold that small library. I am not aware of scientists (other than Professor Stengers and a tiny number of others like her) who read Whitehead. It was the fashion when I was at university for the cohorts just before my own or earlier within my cohorts to read and relish Whitehead. At least two of my university professors had read him and at least those two had studied with Whitehead's admirer and scholar Charles Hartshorne. One of them was admired by Hartshorne.

I suppose Whitehead's later work beginning with either "The Concept of Nature" or "Science and the Modern World" (really the latter I think) questioned the development of modern philosophy beginning with Descartes and rejected Descartes and what emerged from him.

To me Whitehead seemed to construct a view of nature based on psychological analogies but Professor Stengers sees his worldview built on biological analogies (at least I think the device uses analogy). Somehow she also sees this a build on mathematical concepts or mathematical analogies, which I do not understand.

I have never quite understood why Whitehead requires "God" to grant a general apprehension of processes and at least one interpreter agrees. I find his writing on God incomprehensible.

Frankly, Professor Stengers seems as difficult as Whitehead himself without necessarily clarifying Whitehead's scheme. She does incorporate middle to late 20th century Continental philosophies that for me do not clarify Whitehead but do make for complexity which is not bad because the subject is complex.

I have read "Thinking with Whitehead" off and on for several years now and I hope I get to continue to read and think about it. I wish my French were better so that I could read this work in its original language.

I am amazed more reviews are not posted about this work. I think it important and deserving of more analysis and commenary than I am able to offer. This is not a trivial or esoteric work but a sound one.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a thoroughly enjoyable, if difficult, book. Stengers truly "thinks with Whitehead," explaining the Englishman's work by taking up his thoughts in a kind of parallel motion. One note of caution: I think one can only appreciate this work if one has first read the Whitehead texts she mostly engages with. A background in Bergson and William James would be useful. Deleuze and Guattari come up a lot, but I don't feel a background in their work is necessary to appreciate what Stengers does here.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Riveting adventure and exploration of Whitehead’s philosophy. Only the last few chapters on God are incomprehensible to me.

[Ştefan Tiron · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, I wanted to understand why and how this book - thinking through and with Whitehead had such an impact after it was published and translated into English. It was not the love for French thinking or the original that drove me to it. I read it in the French original with the help of the English translation, because the French translation was cheaper and easier to get my hands on than the EN one. I have to say I am not a reader of Deleuze, in fact, I never read Deleuze, I only listened to some of his lectures and became acquainted with him through the work of various Deleuzians (which is not necessarily a good thing). Suffice it to say I first read a Whiteheadian-Deleuzian philosophy book written by Steven Shaviro Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, and this is how I ended up reading Thinking with Whitehead.

Isabelle Stengers has been (amd is still - she's very much alive ans wish her many years ahead, so we my learn more from her) one of the most influential science philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries (ranking with Donna Haraway in terms of impact and international reception. It is incredibly touching to read about someone who has so engaged with a thinker such as Alfred North Whitehead for such a long time. There are many surprises in this book, for everyone I might add. One has to find the patience to read it - but 'patience' is one of the strange virtues that Whitehead attributes to the cosmos.
Why should a reader join Isabelle Stengers in her Whitehedian extended adventures (the book has over 570 pages) frolicking through the speculative scheme and nearly boundless concept construction of a mathematician-turned-philosopher who thrived in the shadows of academia? Why make and why assess a philosophical system or a scheme of your own doing with the help of what gets omitted, of what escapes that conceptualization?
Here I would say that the best of philosophy reads like the best of science fiction, it does not leave you indifferent, it takes you and allures you on an unsuspected but always adequate trajectory that cannot be defined by the rules or the constraints of that scheme. In the end, Isabelle accepts being that 'atom' - or 'electron', or 'Unruh' piece (to pick up a mechanistic term, not an organicist one - one that comes from clock-making but was picked up by Leibniz to define the characteristic of living mechanisms The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick) within the larger 'rouage' of A.N. Whiteheadian thought.
There are no pre-established harmonies, and everything may and is being revised- while never omitting or disparaging. At the same time is a highly risky and uncertain endeavor, this speculative jump, even if it is anchored by habit and belief is always without guarantees and abysmal dangers should never be minimized.

"Comment affirmer sur le meme plan les aventures de Kant es celles d'un shaman, la passion du mathematicien Cantor sentant les categories de sa pensee demembrees par ce a quoi oblige l'infinite continue de nombres, et la decision du mathematicien Hilbert posant les axiomes qui domestetiquent l'infini cantorien?".

Each 'society' has to be approached from the side of what it could have been possible, of what ifs and impossibilities that continue to infect and to inspire the dreams and the dreaming of the physicist not to stop, arrest or judge her or him. Not dispelling the dream, or waking up, but as Isabelle puts in the last chapters - how to distinguish the dream from the nightmare became essential today.
Also, maybe one should start reading Thinking with Whitehead through the more recent Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse - where she becomes even more explicit that navigating and finding a common speculative ground to both the informational 'bubbles' and the wild 'con-spiritual' (conspirative-spiritualistic) speculations after the bungled COVID pandemics and in the mids of ethno-populist resurgence, searching for the commonsensical becomes another dangerous adventure.

[Steven Peck · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult but rewarding read. Made me rethink much about how I view, philosophy and theology. A very careful walk with Whitehead's major books but a with a refusal to grant him ultimate authority even of his own work. A creative and insightful work that will infect my thought for quite sometime.