Constructive v.

Critical
Philosophy – Responding
to Isabelle Stengers
at CGU
Posted on December 4, 2010
Once it has begun to swallow the overwhelmingly wondrous fact of
existence–that there is anything at all!–philosophy can perhaps
catch its breath and ask the most fundamental question: what is
there? From this comes the only slightly more specific questions:
What is a thing? What is an idea? Isabelle Stengers and Donna
Haraway spoke on Thursday night at Claremont Graduate University
on behalf of certain risky abstractions pertaining to the reality of
things and ideas, and of how they merge and diverge in the natures-
cultures that constitute human sociopolitical life.

For Stengers, there are basically two approaches open to the

questioning post-Kantian philosopher. The first is to ask, “What do I
know?”, the second, “What can I know?” The former is speculative
thinking, leaping across the gap in the circuit of perception between
matter and mind by seeing into the web of relationships within
which one is embedded. The latter, the critical approach, separates
the knower from its object, directing attention almost exclusively to
one’s own subjective activities. When the philosopher asks, “What
can I know?”, she means to turn attention to the enduring conditions
of subjective experience which shape and make possible any
perception or understanding of the ongoing phenomena
corresponding to the extra-subjective world. What the world is in
itself, the realist’s question, begins to seem like a grandiose search
for God’s view of the cosmos. Hubris, says Hume. Impossible, says
Kant. Whitehead says not just that we can ask the first question, but
that we must! Life is innately risky, because it is primarily a
speculative affair.  As human creatures endowed with symbolic
intelligence, we become with the spatiotemporal world of physical
events and participate in the realm of eternal ideas. Like the plant-
clothed entangled banks described in the final pages of Darwin’s
Origin, the networks constituting the ecology of classrooms, books,
images, and ideas (the philosopher’s habitat) are discernible,
intelligible even, but these are definitely not actually separable one
from the other, or explainable one in terms of the other. There is no
dualism between mind and matter, or between discourse and nature,
such that one might reduce to the other. For Whitehead, as for
Stengers, propositions infect experience at all levels, from the
electronic and protonic subjective forms of subatomic particles to the
visual and auditory subjective forms of intelligent animals. Nature
thinks about itself, whether it be the thought of hydrogen expressing
the self-love that is gravity to give birth to stars or the thought of
Einstein riding upon a beam of light, giving the power of the sun to
earthly hands.

Abstractions, for Whitehead and Stengers, are lures for feeling. Each
form of abstract description allows a different world to take shape
before our imagination. We have no choice but to have speculative
trust in our descriptions and the images they suggest, because we
have no other basis for continuing the adventure of rationality.
Contradictions and antinomies, which are oft met along the road of
rational discourse, must be transformed into constructive contrasts.
This transformation is the work of common sense, that most
spontaneous and marvelous judge of truth, beauty, and goodness,
and the light of our humanity. Not theory, but common sense, ought
to be the final arbiter of our judgments. This is the Jamesian
pragmatism and precursive trust that Whitehead and Stengers
are committed to.

The Golden Rule of Whiteheadian philosophy of organism,

according to Stengers, is that one ought never to offer abstractions
that erase situatedness. Perhaps it is this very situatedness, the sense
of being embedded in ecologies of meaningful matter, that generates
the philosopher’s original sense of astonishment at the fact of being.
Philosophy need not outgrow wonder in order to reveal the deeper
nature of things. Its revelation in fact preserves wonder, opening our
common sense to the adventure of a world in the making.