Speculative Inquiry: Thinking With Whitehead

• In Event: 21st Century Inquiry After Methodology

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: In this paper, the author “thinks with Whitehead” to posit what his philosophy opens up for “new” approaches to inquiry. The paper specifically addresses what newness is made possible with the following questions:
• What is experience and how can it be thought given a recalibration made possible with Whitehead’s process philosophy?
• How does our orientation shift if we think not of subjects, but of “sense-objects” (Stengers, 2011, p. 82), or the subject as “all that is?”

Perspectives or theoretical frameworks:
The thread to which all the concepts in Whitehead’s speculative philosophy adhere is what he names the “ontological principle” and how a recalibration of experience and the subject, integral to the ontological principle, presents a different starting point and set of propositions from which to begin inquiry. Midway through Process and Reality, he wrote what seems a simplistic statement, “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (Whitehead, 1978, p. 244). In other words, everything that is, every actual entity, every being, whether human or otherwise, exists in the universe and is known, or comes to be in relation to/with other actual entities. “Reality is the process and an entity’s being is “constituted by its becoming” (Whitehead, 1967, p. 23). This paper focuses on the idea of actual entities and relation as it presents an entry point to thinking experience and the subject with Whitehead. To think of entities (subjects) as what Stengers (2011) names a “sense-object,” is to situate a sense-object, and therefore the subject, as “all that is” (p. 82). Without sensing, without experience, there are no entities.

Mode of inquiry: Methodological/theoretical

Data sources, evidence, warrants: This paper is enabled by Whitehead’s philosophy of organism.

Results and significance:
In St. Pierre’s discussion of a curriculum for new inquiry, she cautions that “we cannot simply ‘add ontology and stir,’ … thereby retaining the descriptions of human being, language, … and empiricism that organize the ontology, epistemology and methodology of humanism we’ve been taught and have learned so well. (St. Pierre, 2016, p. 2). What is needed is an unlearning of thinking dictated by the strictures of language. This paper presents a recalibration that starts not from the place of deconstructing many of the language markers that have previously been deconstructed, specifically the subject and experience, but a different beginning and a new set of questions from which to begin inquiry given Whitehead’s process philosophy. “To think with Whitehead is … to affirm that the success of a philosophical proposition is not to resist objections but to give rise to what he himself calls a “leap of the imagination” (PR, 4)—and the point is to experiment with the effects of that leap: what it does to thought, what it obliges one to do, what it renders important, and what it makes remain silent” (Stengers, 2011, p. 23).

Author

• Lisa A. Mazzei, University of Oregon