"Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse" (2023)

Reflections on Isabelle Stengers' new book

Isabelle Stengers’ recent book Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse provides a thorough exploration of the relevance of Alfred North Whitehead’s philosophy, particularly in navigating the “post-truth” era and the broader planetary emergency. Stengers focuses on how Whitehead’s ideas can help reconstitute a form of common sense in a world where scientific facts are contested, misused, or isolated from lived experience. This book, following her earlier work Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, tackles the social and political implications of Whitehead’s philosophy, rather than focusing purely on scientific or metaphysical issues. Stengers’ earlier work delved into the more technical aspects of Whitehead’s process philosophy, but Making Sense in Common directly addresses the cultural and existential crises of today, including the fragmentation of knowledge and the rise of alternative facts.

Stengers points out that in the modern period, experts and scientists have often contradicted and even humiliated common sense. Science has been positioned as disinterested, objective, and universal, and this has led to a widening gap between specialized scientific knowledge and the general public. Experts claim to know better and are empowered by the state to impose their findings on local populations. This dynamic has triggered populist and reactionary politics where the public increasingly rejects the authority of experts. People are tired of being told what to believe by those who seem to hold all the knowledge. The sense of humiliation felt by everyday people, combined with the failure of scientific abstractions to fully capture reality outside controlled conditions, has led to a deep distrust of expert knowledge. What works in the lab may not hold true when applied in the wild, as seen with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and other techno-scientific interventions with unforeseen consequences. Stengers does not demonize experts or the public, or allow either side to claim victory or victimhood, but instead calls for a new way of establishing facts—through a “generative apparatus” where citizens engage in deliberative democracy with scientists. This would allow knowledge to be co-created through dialogue rather than imposed from above.

The “diplomatic method” Stengers advocates seeks to include as many perspectives as possible while still respecting the integrity of scientific knowledge. She wants to move away from the myth of the isolated fact, which often becomes a domineering force both in society and in the treatment of non-human nature. Whitehead’s philosophy, as Stengers presents it, challenges the view that nature is simply a collection of passive objects waiting to be known by scientists. Instead, nature is full of life, even in its smallest components, such as atoms and molecules. For Whitehead, self-organizing societies of actual occasions of experience exist at every level of nature, and “laws of nature” (or, better, nature’s widespread habits) emerge from the collective behavior and decisions of these occasions. Physical laws, such as those governing particle physics, are seen as enduring tendencies established by these societies, rather than as eternal laws imposed from some external source. These behaviors are habitual enough that we can mathematize them, at least within certain limit conditions.

Whitehead’s idea of “societies” expands beyond human groups to include all forms of communal order in nature. Just as human societies develop customs and laws, so do collectives at all scales in nature. The laws of nature that scientists discover are, in Whitehead’s view, the result of shared habits formed by these societies of actual occasions. Whitehead’s broader metaphysical framework helps us see that even the simplest physical processes have a form of life and some modicum of decision-making capacity, some degree of aim (even if unconscious). Stengers builds on this by emphasizing that scientific knowledge should not be separated from the practical, lived experiences of people and should not ignore the agency of non-human beings.

Stengers refers to Whitehead’s comment that the philosopher’s task is to weld together imagination and common sense. This reflects her desire to find a balance between honoring everyday experience and being open to the shock of a new insight that challenges what we had taken for granted. She highlights how common sense and scientific or metaphysical thought can sometimes be at odds, but that both everyday experience and specialized knowledge are necessary to navigate the complexities of the contemporary world. Stengers revisits the so-called “science wars,” which erupted in the 1990s, where scientists and social theorists clashed over the nature of knowledge. Physicists often belittled social critics of science by asking whether they would defy gravity by jumping out of a window, as if there were no difference between the embodied know-how that prevents even non-physicists from trying to fly and the technical formulation of physical laws meant to describe motion quantitatively. Stengers is critical of this rhetoric, pointing out that even within physics, there are multiple competing theories of gravity, and the dominance of Einstein’s theory is more historical than purely empirical (there are dozens of other empirically equivalent theories of gravity, including Whitehead’s!).

It is helpful to read Whitehead’s last book, Modes of Thought (1938) alongside Stengers’ Making Sense in Common. In this book, Whitehead distinguishes between the superficial elements of experience—what is clear and distinct in our sensory perceptions—and the deeper, more constant elements that are often vague and unnoticed. While most of our attention is on the sharp outlines and distinct objects seen with our eyes, Whitehead draws attention to what remains in the background: the necessities of experience, such as bodily feelings and physiological processes, that usually operate without our conscious awareness. For Whitehead, metaphysics seeks to bring these invariable, often ignored elements of experience into focus, offering a deeper understanding of the world.

He tells us that in this effort, we’re not in a position to be totally systematic. Our premises are as yet uncertain. He says later in this book that philosophy is the search for premises; philosophy is not just deduction. Logic is a tool that philosophers can use, but it’s not the master guiding the philosophical enterprise. He mentions Kurt Gödel here—not by name—but talking about this new development in logic. Only six or seven years before he publishes this book, Modes of Thought, Kurt Gödel had developed his incompleteness theorems, which set certain limits on formal systems, including this attempt to ground arithmetic in logic that Whitehead was engaged in earlier in his career with Bertrand Russell in the Principia Mathematica. It turns out that a closed system produces statements that can’t be proved by that system and could even generate statements that are contradictory in the terms of that system.

Whitehead wants to keep his system open, but he doesn’t even have the hubris to call his approach here a system yet. He’s approaching the work of philosophy as what he calls assemblage. He’s just trying to gather together those ideas in terms of which we can characterize our experience, and he wants these ideas to have some coherence, to require one another for their definitions. He is seeking a coordination between our experience and the ideas in terms of which we can understand that experience.

In the first chapters of Modes of Thought, Whitehead introduces three fundamental ideas: importance, expression, and understanding. He contrasts importance with mere fact, arguing that while facts appear static, our freedom lies in selecting what is important among them. Importance has to do with the unity of the universe, while interest, a subset of importance, deals with individual details. Whitehead insists that scientists are not disinterested observers; their zeal for truth presupposes interest, and their work is driven by a perspective that emphasizes certain facts over others. For Whitehead, the scientific pursuit is always an act of valuing, not a dispassionate observation of facts.

One of Whitehead’s most significant critiques is of the “myth of the finite fact”—the idea that facts exist in isolation from one another. Whitehead argues that all facts are interconnected, existing in a vast nexus of relations. This idea of a “mere fact,” of an isolated fact, is the triumph of abstractive intellect. Animals and young babies don’t have a notion of mere fact; they certainly have a sense of interest and importance and value in their experience, but the idea of a fact standing alone in the universe, isolated, that could be objectively examined—that doesn’t arise until you have a very complicated conceptual network that allows you to distinguish one finite fact from another finite fact. Because the fact is, all facts are connected; they exist in a nexus of relations to one another. So each seemingly independent fact actually presupposes a background of many other facts stretching out to the edges of the universe.

Whitehead agrees with Plato that sometimes deep truths must be adumbrated by myth. The ideal of an isolated fact is an abstraction that can help science advance, but abstractions should not be mistaken for the concrete realities of experience. In Making Sense in Common, Stengers returns to this idea, emphasizing the need for scientists and citizens alike to remain aware of the abstractions they use and how these shape the reality they perceive. Finite knowledge is possible, but we must remain humble to avoid exaggerating our understanding. The universe is vast, as Whitehead likes to remind us.

Whitehead also discusses how feelings shape our experience of facts, turning objective data into something subjectively meaningful. Each perspective on the universe is shaped by feelings, which prioritize certain facts and values over others. Feeling reduces the infinitude of the universe to a finite perspective by creating a gradation of relevant importance. Feeling allows us to take a point of view, rendering mere fact into the realization of some value. This view of reality as perspectival, always plural and value-organized, means that there are always multiple theories that can explain the same set of data. Theories are not simply objective descriptions of the world but reflect the perspectives and interests of those who create them.

In later chapters of Modes of Thought, Whitehead introduces the concept of “prehension,” a term he uses to describe the way entities feel and interpret the world around them. Prehension involves both a private, internal enjoyment of experience and a public, external expression of it. This oscillation between inward feeling and outward expression is key to understanding both human consciousness and physical processes. Stengers highlights how this concept of prehension can be applied not only to human experiences but to all entities in the universe, from molecules to organisms, as they engage with their environment and contribute to the unfolding of the cosmos.

Stengers also explores Whitehead’s concept of actual occasions—individual units of experience that arise and perish in an ongoing process. These occasions are both subjects and objects at difference phases of their experience, and their “superjective” decisions shape the future of the universe. Each occasion, in its birth and death, is another “stitch” added to the fabric of reality, which is never finished but always growing at its edges. Every actual occasion inherits the past and aims at the future, contributing to the flow of causes and possibilities that permeate reality. This decision-making process is not limited to conscious beings but occurs at all levels of nature, suggesting that the universe is not a static collection of facts but a living process, a network of activities pregnant with potential.

Stengers contrasts what Whitehead does with his concept of actual occasions with what Kant was forced to do in his transcendental idealism, where the subject is divided off from the object, mind from reality. These are two very different modes of being in Kant’s philosophy: the subject is free, self-determining, and it constructs a merely apparent world of objects. Objects are determined by the activity of a transcendental subject. There’s a bifurcation in Kant’s philosophy between the decisions made by free subjects and the causes and effects that determine natural objects. In Whitehead’s account of the actual occasion as both a subject and an object, or a subject and a superject, cause and decision are no longer bifurcated. Every actual occasion of experience is a process of decision: its subjectivity, its existence as a subject, is constituted by the decision it makes about how to inherit its past and how to influence its future. A decision is made that unifies the multitude of facts inherited from the past, and a new perspective on the universe is achieved—a unique, once-occurring experient emerges. Part of this achievement of perspective is also an aim at future possibilities. But an actual occasion can only affect the future by perishing: it achieves the satisfaction of its novel perspective and immediately perishes out of subjectivity into “superjectivity”—or, Whitehead will also say, into “objective immortality”—and it gives the value it has achieved, the perspective it has won, to the future, to be taken up by the next occasion of experience.

What’s the difference between an actual occasion and a society? Actual occasions arise and perish; they do not endure through physical time, and they do not change. They are what they are. Once they’ve achieved their decisive satisfaction, they transition into objective immortality. Whitehead’s describing a kind of process, a becoming, that goes on in the concrescence of an actual occasion that is not yet in physical or measurable clock-time. This process within concrescence that constitutes an actual occasion is immeasurable; an occasion’s growth from phase to phase cannot be tracked with a stopwatch. Actual occasions, once they concresce, are inherited by subsequent actual occasions. This process of inheritance and transition from one occasional “stitch” to the next “stitch” weaves together what we call space-time in a relativistic context. The physical spacetime measured by physicists is consequence of the decisions of actual occasions, a result of how they’ve stitched the past together with the future through the medium of the present.

We have to imagine a different kind of process when we’re talking about an actual occasion of experience. When we’re talking about a society, we’re talking about a kind of spatiotemporally extended lineage of occasions that maintains a definite characteristic despite the fact that societies are continually changing. Anything in our experience that endures—which is basically everything that we usually experience with our senses—is a society: a table, a chair, a teacup; a blade of grass, a tree, a bird—all are societies of actual occasions, or really, nested societies of societies. Each of our organ systems has its own characteristic style of growth and decay and metamorphosis. But because the human body is an interrelated system of centers of experience, there’s a participation of each part in the construction of all the other parts, and so in the construction of a whole. What we experience as our stream of consciousness from moment to moment is one lineage of occasions within the society of societies which constitutes our organism.

Each of these societies creates a kind of shelter or filter for that stream of conscious occasions that Whitehead says is flitting through the interstices of our brain from moment to moment. The rest of the body creates a kind of filter that amplifies our experience of the environment, and the various sensory organs are specific channels for such amplification. They all feed into what he’ll call the dominant occasion of experience or stream of consciousness. But even here, we each have multiple personalities to some degree; or if you think in terms of Carl Jung’s or James Hillman’s psychology, there are many archetypes at play in our psyche aside from just the ego. Even in the case of the ego, there’s multiple drafts of our self-sense, you might say, and we’re always in conversation between different aspects of ourselves, having to interpret and justify the thoughts and actions of our past selves to our present self. Unity and multiplicity are exactly what’s at issue when we’re talking about societies, and you need to have a flexible imagination to grasp what Whitehead is talking about here.

If we were to analyze a society at any given moment of its life history, then we’d be talking about an actual occasion. But when we talk about how bodies persist through spacetime, we’re always, in that case, talking about a society. Now it is essential to remember that these are abstractions, tools for thinking with and tools for eliciting new thoughts. It might take some time to get used to thinking with and speaking in Whitehead’s language, but once you do begin to internalize this way of conceptualizing and analyzing your experience, I think it elucidates that experience. It allows you to become more aware of the way in which your concepts and your words are not just describing something given but, in fact, the way you speak and think is part of what’s bringing forth the very structure of the experienced world.

Whitehead was a mathematician before he was a philosopher. In Modes of Thought, he articulates a unique view of the interplay between the supposedly eternal truths of mathematics and the facts of cosmic history. How is it that, on the one hand, mathematics gives us such deep insight into the rhythms and the patterns that shape the physical processes of the world, but on the other hand, the numbers and relations described by mathematics seem to have an eternal status, a kind of static existence removed from or transcending the physical world? This is, of course, the Platonic point of view, and Whitehead is a kind of neoplatonist. He admits his debt to Plato and thinks all philosophy in the West is “footnotes to Plato.” But he’s critical of Plato’s tendency to imagine the realm of mathematical forms as static and issuing from a heavenly dimension entirely abstracted from the actual world-process.

Whitehead wants to emphasize another doctrine that remains somewhat under-appreciated in Plato’s dialogue Timaeus. Namely, Plato’s doctrine of “life and motion,” the idea of the soul of the world. Whitehead wants to bring mathematical forms back into process and show how arithmetic, for example, is not an eternal fixity of numerical pattern, but itself a pattern of processes. Mathematicians over the course of history have generally downplayed the relational dimension of math, that is, the way that mathematical reasoning is grounded intuitive pattern recognition. They’ve instead emphasized its abstract eternality. Whitehead celebrates the prowess of mathematical abstraction, noting that the first human being to discover the identity of pattern between seven fishes and seven stars took a tremendous leap forward. Math has certainly advanced human understanding, but Whitehead says it’s also introduced novel modes of error. It turns out—and Whitehead would know, having authored Principia Mathematica with Bertrand Russell and so knowing a little bit about the logical status of numbers—there’s no such entity as a mere static number. Numbers are relational entities, they’re patterned processes. Numbers issue in forms of process which become the data for further forms of process.

How do these truths of mathematics—how does the multiplication table, for example—relate to our heartbeat or the global climate or to the ion channels in the membranes of cells? How is it that we can gain a kind of mathematical understanding of these cosmic processes? Nature clearly exemplifies mathematical form, and this exemplification is a kind of participation. Whitehead borrows this Platonic notion of participation to understand the relationship between eternal form and actual fact, but he inverts it. For Whitehead, what’s truly valuable and important and what has preeminent reality are not the forms themselves but the actual occasions of experience responsible for ingressing them, for deciding to realize them. He thus seeks to incarnate form into fact.

You might question, as Whitehead himself does, whether this throwing into motion of form threatens the very possibility of a rational accounting of things, because reason generally operates in terms of generalities, in terms of universal rules that apply across all particular instances. If reality is a creative process of utterly unique occurrences, how can we determine them scientifically? How can we think these unique occurrences in terms of universal rules? Whitehead admits that it is here that logic and math display their limits. Reality is not a deterministic equation or machine reducible to algorithmic computations. But there’s another means of gaining a kind of knowledge of the relationship between form and fact, and for Whitehead that’s analogy. The method of rationality for Whitehead is analogy. We’re comparing this to that, not to erase the differences but to discover identities amidst diversities.

Whitehead’s whole philosophy is an attempt to look at all the special sciences and draw analogies between them so that we can begin to see how an account of the transmission of physical energy in some ways also reveals something about the flow of emotion in our psychological experience, and vice versa. These two extremes of reality can be compared to each other—not identified but compared—and we can see what the underlying similarities might be.

Stengers emphasizes that Whitehead’s philosophy is not a rigid doctrine but a speculative method for cultivating a deeper awareness of how our modes of abstraction shape reality. Concepts like prehension, actual occasion, and society are tools for thinking about the dynamic interplay between objective data and subjective feelings, individuals and collectives, facts and possibilities, and they help us remain vigilant about the effects of our abstractions on the world. In this way, Whitehead’s ideas provide a way to think beyond the limitations of modern science, which often focuses too narrowly on quantifiable data while ignoring the richer, more complex reality of lived experience. Stengers was originally trained as a chemist, and so it is no surprise she invites us to engage with Whitehead’s concepts as akin to the catalysts that chemists would use to produce reactions and new compounds.

Whitehead’s novel notion of “propositions” also plays a central role in Stengers’ reading. Propositions, for Whitehead, are not merely logical judgments or verbal statements but hybrid entities that hold together actuality and potentiality. They represent a fusion of logical subjects (actual entities) and predicative patterns (possibilities or eternal objects). Propositions act as “lures for feeling,” drawing entities into relationships with one another and helping them navigate between the real and the possible, what is and what could be. This zigzag movement between actuality and potentiality is central to both Whitehead’s and Stengers’ thought, as it reflects the ongoing process of creation and transformation in the universe.

Stengers also introduces the idea of “contact zones” (borrowed from her friend Donna Haraway), where entities—whether human, non-human, or conceptual abstractions—interact and transform one another. These zones are where propositions are entertained and where individuals and societies engage in collective decision-making. The transformative power of these interactions is what allows societies to evolve and adapt, but it also requires careful attention to the abstractions and assumptions that guide them. Stengers’ call for “generative apparatuses” for making sense in common is an invitation to encounter one another in such zones of contact, spaces where people can come together to make decisions that do not belong to any single individual but emerge through collective engagement. These apparatuses are not neutral; they transform their participants, shaping our perspectives and opening us up to new possibilities. In this way, decision-making becomes a creative act, one that acknowledges the fluidity of identity and the interdependence of all beings.

Stengers describes the way that the brooding of common sense over aspects of existence is always going to transcend our finite understanding because existence itself is not an object of knowledge. As Kant would say, existence is not a predicate; it’s vaguer than that. It’s not something we can easily put into words or verbalize, but nonetheless we feel or enjoy existence. Existence matters to us—it carries importance, even if we can’t ever define precisely, clearly, and distinctly what that importance is.

Stengers wants to maintain this capacity to brood over that which science and even metaphysics can’t finally define. When we do seek understanding in Whitehead’s sense, we’re seeking a kind of aesthetic achievement; we’re seeking a kind of satisfaction, an experiential satisfaction, a sense of intellectual satisfaction. True understanding is the realization of an aesthetic quality, which for Whitehead signals some inchoate grasp of the whole, of the totality. When we understand something, we see the whole; we feel the whole. Then we can analyze this whole metaphysically or scientifically, but always in an open-ended way, maintaining a sense for the feeling of the totality and never forgetting that our abstract analyses presuppose the feeling of the whole. There’s no way to explain, by reference to the abstractions that we come up with in our analysis, the concreteness out of which those abstractions derive and from which they gain their meaning. For Whitehead, abstraction cannot explain concreteness; it’s always concreteness that explains abstraction.

Stengers discusses “the bifurcation of nature,” which is what Galileo engaged in when he separated the primary characteristics of mass and the dimensionality of physically extended objects and so on from the secondary characteristics of perception—colors, sounds, tastes, and so on—everything added by subjectivity. For Galileo, all those subjective qualities are not in nature; what’s in nature are just the measurable, mathematizable characteristics of material bodies. This bifurcation of nature has been characteristic of modern science, and it’s a rather violent form of abstraction that severs nature right down the middle.

Whitehead is seeking an unbifurcated view of nature where, for the purposes of science, we could define nature as everything that we are aware of in perception. That includes all the stuff Galileo wants to measure and quantify, but it also includes qualities. Nature is then not just the wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation and the statistical mechanics of vibrating molecules that a physicist might measure; it’s also the beautiful red hue and comforting warmth of the sunset.

But it’s apparent that, at least in physics, science can often get away with this bifurcation because in the non-biological world, highly precise general laws seem to hold, at least well enough for the purposes of making pretty accurate predictions based on mathematical models. We know that these laws are statistical, and we also know that in the biological world, general laws don’t really hold anymore. It is far more difficult, when it’s engaging with the living world—with the biosphere, with living organisms—to try to find general laws and accurate models. In the biological world, we’re always dealing with self-creating organisms, and each organism in each situation it finds itself in is making unique decisions. Biologists have to study the creativity of these organisms in order to characterize them scientifically. Organisms don’t just mutely persist in a law-like way; organisms instead must continually strive to maintain themselves, to transform their environments, to forge new associations with others. They exist moment by moment as an achievement—not just a sort of inert fact but as an activity.

Further, when we study living organisms, they’re aware of our presence; they respond to our ways of engaging with them. There’s a kind of interactive feedback. Twentieth-century physics became acutely aware of the issue of the observer and measurement in quantum physics—raising the problem of the subject in its relationship to the object in a way that science hadn’t had to deal with for the first few hundred years of its existence. Just so, in biology it’s even more obvious that the way that we observe and attempt to measure organisms is going to affect how that which we are observing behaves.

Subjects are constituted by their feelings of objects; objects are the perished feelings of subject-superjects. The relationship Whitehead is trying to describe, whereby subjects and objects are constantly passing into and out of one another, is described by Stengers as an example of what grammarians call the middle voice, where it’s not clear whether the subject is acting upon or being affected by the object. Consider the view of a coastline from above, You see the waves coming in and colliding with a rock outcropping. Imagine how the waves coming in would hit this rock and curl around as the wave crashes into the shore. If you look closely, you can see both how the rock is affecting the waves and how the rock is affected by the waves. The shape of the rock has arisen over many decades, centuries perhaps, given to it by the pressure of the tides. In turn, the rock is not only affecting the ocean by shaping how the wave crashes to the shore around it, but you can also see, rippling out from the rock itself in all directions, both towards the shore and back out towards the ocean, this other wave pattern, this other vibration.

Water is alive. Part of what gives it its complex beauty is the way that waves can run over each other. Sometimes they interfere with each other, but sometimes they don’t; they just ripple through each other in independent directions as if totally unaware of one another. So you have the waves coming into the shore—a much longer wavelength, kind of slower rhythm—and then you have the waves, the vibrations echoing out from the rock itself back into the ocean. Wave and rock, rock and ocean are in this interplay, existing in between one another, coexisting. Whitehead’s metaphysics is really trying to provide us with an adequate means of describing situations like this, where what is the subject in one moment from one perspective becomes object in another moment from another perspective.

Rather than opposing two sides of reality and creating a kind of dualism, as you get in so much modern philosophy, Whitehead is trying to think things together; he’s trying to think togetherness. It’s a difficult task because we’re so used to thinking things apart, because our sense perception of the world, especially through our eyes—our visual experience of the world—backgrounds its own bodily reference. It lends itself to a kind of disembodied, outside-in sort of view on the world, where we come to imagine that colored patches in regions of space constitute the basic, raw form of our experience. Maybe if we have some memory that we want to add to our visual experience, we can detect meaningful movements, but memory is not part of the presentational immediacy of our visual experience as such, so we have to leave memory to one side if we’re being fussily exact about it.

If we only pay attention to the superficialities disclosed to our visual experience and we ignore, because of its vagueness, the vector feelings of our bodily life, then we end up with a picture of nature that’s rather abstract, but is clear and distinct and amenable to a kind of scientific investigation. The primitive notions of positivist philosophy of science are all in evidence here: sense data and the self-evident premises of logic, and with these simple ingredients science can supposedly build up a world picture that would be indubitable. But Whitehead’s point is that our premises will never be entirely clear and fixed and finished, and our sense experience is not simply visual.

Sometimes the world discloses propositions to us which we don’t yet have words for. Sometimes our own thinking discloses a facet of experience for which we don’t yet have the words to adequately describe or convey—to describe to ourselves or convey to others. How we begin to think the world back together again requires not just better ideas but a more diplomatic method of composing perspectives with others. As human beings, we’re bound up in language, and while thought and language are not identical, the language that we speak and that we write with certainly feeds back onto our thinking, shaping our thinking, luring it to attend, to pay attention to certain aspects of the world and to ignore other aspects of the world—particularly all those aspects which are not easily translated into the alphabetic language that we have mastered or been mastered by.

Modern physics, because of its obsession with visual feelings and logical inductions and deductions therefrom, leaves us with a sort of abstract conception of an activity of energetic transmission which it describes mathematically. It leaves us with an impression of an abstract activity in which nothing is affected, because there’s no value in this picture of nature. There’s no emotional purpose; there’s no meaning; nothing is being affected. It’s just the playing out of formulas of succession for no reason. This sort of positivist misconception doesn’t even allow you to think the reality of causal transmission in nature and so ultimately leaves us unable to even do science.

This approach to the philosophy of science leaves us as philosophers with these two sort of false choices: either idealism, where nature is said to be a mere appearance in mind, the sole reality; or materialism, where physics is said to be the sole reality and mind is dismissed as an epiphenomenon. Both of these—idealism and materialism—Whitehead finds inadequate, rooted in a faulty premise, which is that our experiential disclosure of nature comes primarily through the senses as outward-facing measures of external reality that we can internally represent. That whole picture is one Whitehead wants to explode.

He wants to think in terms that don’t lead us into this false dichotomy between idealism and materialism. He wants to think a middle term, in the middle voice, which you could call life. For Whitehead, life includes individual self-enjoyment that arises out of a process of appropriation. In other words, the inner life of an organism is at the same time an internalization of its environment. What we might call, in the case of a human organism, the soul—the living personality that inherits each moment of its life history as valuable and leans into a future with purposes that it is seeking to realize; it has aims, and it’s creating itself—these are all aspects of life that Whitehead thinks are present not only in the human being but throughout the biosphere and indeed all energetic process back to the beginnings of the universe.

In order to affirm this about nature, we need to go deeper than just our visual perceptions of surfaces. We need to go into our bodily feelings, because for Whitehead it’s in our bodily feelings that human experience is most intimately in contact with the actualities of nature. What’s going on in our own bodily feelings is an exemplification of what’s going on throughout the natural world. The transmission of energy in nature is also a pulsation of emotion. Whitehead wants to generalize our own bodily experience, suggesting that it provides us with direct evidence of the interiority of nature, that which does not appear on the surface to our outward senses. It’s not sense perception of the external world; it’s bodily feeling of our own moment-by-moment existence, inheriting our own past bodily states and being infused by events in our environment. This is the life of nature. While physics doesn’t need to attend to this in its model-making, if it interprets those models ontologically, it’s going to need to bring life back in.

Stengers concludes by urging us to be aware of the generative power of our ideas and abstractions. She calls for a more participatory, democratic approach to knowledge creation, where citizens and scientists work together to form a more complete understanding of the world. Through this collaboration, we can create a shared sense of reality that respects both scientific expertise and the lived experiences of individuals and communities, while also acknowledging the agency of non-human beings in shaping the world.

Listen to the lectures that this essay is based on: