There is therefore no stable and essential distinction, for Whitehead, between mind and matter, or between subject and object. There is also no stable and essential distinction between human and non-human, or even between living and non-living. It’s not that such distinctions are unimportant; often they are of the greatest pragmatic importance. I should not treat a human being the way that I treat a stone. But we need to remember that these distinctions are always situational. They are differences of degree, not differences of essence or kind. Whitehead seeks to produce a metaphysics that is non-anthropomorphic and non-anthropocentric. This means that he is a secular and naturalistic thinker, but one of a very special sort. He rejects supernatural explanations, holding to what he calls the ontological principle: the claim that “actual entities are the only reasons” (24), that “the search for a reason is always the search for an actual fact which is the vehicle of that reason” (40). For “there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere. Everything in the actual world is referable to some actual entity” (244). This means that empiricism is ultimately correct: all our knowledge comes from experience, and there is nothing outside experience, or beyond it. Even the concept of God needs to be secularized, explained in empirical terms, and located within phenomenal experience (207).

More on Whitehead from Steven Shaviro.

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Art installation by Kjell Varvin

Tags:deleuzedualismempericismexperienceholismnaturalismpan-experientialismSteven Shavirowhitehead