Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North whitehead (Copy)
In Isabelle Stenger’s readings she calls upon key takeaways in Whitehead’s works on challenging the assumption that there exist universal laws of physics governing nature and the lofty notion that a ‘so called omniscient point of view” is possible. While I have encountered these Whiteheadian ideas before, I still experience an iconoclastic combustion that rattles and disorients me from a childhood construction of reality. The omniscient point of view has long been occupied by God or so it was presented to me early in my Catholic upbringing. More than this God’s eye view feeling watchfully comforting, I experienced it as an externalization of an intrusive critic leaning over me. Couple the ever-observing omniscient point of view with the disavowal of the validity of the subjective perspective, and it is not hard to imagine how it became so that embodiment lost relevance being replaced by the objective knowledge discovered by Science. Stengers reminds of Whitehead’s “bifurcation of nature” which polarized the objective and subjective relegating the former, referring to human, as inferior possessing “the ceaseless bustle of beliefs and value judgments are considered arbitrary, for ultimately, humans alone are deemed responsible for them”.
Reading the actual first hand writings by Whitehead creatively opened up my mind up to imagining what different “Modes of Thought” I am aware of. In the spirit of process thinking, I attempted to discretely observe experiences of prehension (Whitehead’s term for currents of unconscious feelings) in my own meta-cognitive awareness to attempt to notice and trace a map of the directionality of my thoughts. Could I observe the toggling filament of discernment involved in the selection process? What is involved in the process of going towards what is important?
A point for me of elongated contemplation fawned over the sentence in Whitehead’s Modes of Thought “it has its origin in the thought of ourselves as process, immersed in process beyond ourselves”. The waves of concrescence require our subjective embodiment to translate the process of selection and defining importance.
Stengers, Isabelle. Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Whitehead, Alfred North. Modes of Thought. New York: Free Press, 1968