On Aesthetics and Mentality in Speculative Philosophy Today

“With analytical philosophers under the spell of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and Continentals enamored with Husserlian and Heideggerian phenomenology, Whitehead’s brazen adoption of an outmoded philosophical method fated his work to gather dust on bookshelves for the rest of the 20th century.”

“In her companion to Whitehead’s Process and Reality, Elizabeth M. Kraus notes that, “Process and Reality undoubtedly ranks as one of the most difficult works in philosophical literature, second only to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel’s Logic.””

“Indeed, not only does Whitehead develop a metaphysical system that derails nearly every common-sense assumption we have about the world, including the vocabulary we use to talk about it, but it also presupposes an in-depth familiarity with certain branches of mathematics, such as point-free geometry. If Whitehead’s later work was read in the 20th century, it was not by philosophers, but by process theologians who discovered in Whitehead a notion of God that requires the world just as much as the reverse is true. Thus, unless you were working in this little-known field of theology, dredging through the pages of Whitehead’s daunting work would have hardly seemed worth the effort.”

“Steven Shaviro’s latest book on Whitehead, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism, is a part of the outgrowth of interest in Whitehead’s thought for addressing the problems of contemporary life. This is not Shaviro’s first book on Whitehead, however. In 2009 he published Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, a book that deftly negotiates the deep aesthetic and ontological connections running through the work of Whitehead, Kant, and Deleuze. In many ways Without Criteria expressed concerns that had been brewing for years in some Continental circles over the language- and subject-centered climate of Continental thought since Heidegger. In particular, it performed the necessary service of connecting the already well-established discourse on Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence to Whitehead’s philosophy of organism (neither of which privilege language or the human subject), and grounded this connection in their mutual indebtedness to Kantian philosophy.”

“In many ways, The Universe of Things is a companion piece to Without Criteria, inasmuch as it too uses Whitehead’s later work to intervene on the crippling habits of thought that grip Western philosophy. But this time, Shaviro’s target is not limited to the influence of Heidegger on post-World War II thought, but it extends much further back, and takes aim at what took shape in the wake of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution.” According to Shaviro, although Kant’s transcendental idealism forged a resolution between rationalists on the one hand and empiricists on the other, what resulted from this compromise is a world that is never knowable in-itself, and is only assessable through the straightjacket of the categories the human mind uses to understand it. In the wake of Kantian thought, we cannot have access to “things in themselves”; we can only ever know how the world appears to us. Thus, what emerged from Kant’s descent into the mind in the 18th century was an intellectual climate in which the world apart from human access has been unthinkable ever since, and those who claim to think it — e.g., scientists and metaphysicians — are “naïve realists.” Some version of this Kantian idea (its variations are many) pervades philosophy throughout the 19th, 20th, and early 21st centuries on both sides of the Atlantic — from phenomenology and post-structuralism in European thought to philosophy of mind and epistemology in the Anglo-American tradition.”

“And it is overcoming this post-Kantian predicament that preoccupies the recent development in Continental philosophy known as speculative realism, and animates Shaviro’s revival of Whitehead in The Universe of Things.”

“Take the first chapter, “Self-Enjoyment and Concern”: there, Shaviro sets himself the task of illustrating how any occasion of experience — which is not unique to humans, but is immanent to the material world, traversing organic and inorganic systems alike — is at once an immediate, self-contained satisfaction and a concern for past and future experiences. Instead of insisting upon the opposition between self-enjoyment and concern, Whitehead contends that there is a deeper complementarity between the two, which creates a “patterned contrast”: “concern is itself a kind of self-enjoyment,” Shaviro remarks, “and it arises out of the very process of immediate self-enjoyment, for it is precisely when ‘engaged in its own immediate self-realization’ that an occasion finds itself most vitally ‘concerned with the universe’ that lies beyond it.””

“What’s intriguing, if exemplary of The Universe of Things’ idiosyncratic style, is that Shaviro then sets himself the task of comparing Whitehead’s aesthetics to Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics. Odd as it may seem to begin a monograph on Whitehead and Speculative Realism by returning to Levinas, who is neither a realist nor a reader of Whitehead, Shaviro rightly points out that Levinas is largely responsible for the “ethical turn” in Continental thought, and thus our contemporary intuition that ethics and politics (or concern) are primary, or are, in any case, more fundamental than aesthetics.”

“Although Whitehead emerges triumphant in Shaviro’s narrative — that is, a subject’s relation (or concern) for the Other (Levinas) is inseparable from its own self-enjoyment (Whitehead) — I actually think that the encounter between Whitehead and Levinas is deeper than this. Shaviro facilitates an aesthetic encounter between the two: Levinas confirms an intuition about the world, namely, that a subject’s relation to the other transcends it, but this transcendence is not opposed to the immanence of the subject’s self-enjoyment. Between Whitehead and Levinas, then, there exists an aesthetic relation.”

“Indeed, that there is a deeper, aesthetic interpenetration of things, or what Whitehead calls “causal efficacy,” confirms our intuition that “I always feel more of a thing than I actually know of it, and I feel it otherwise than I know it.” For Whitehead, “things both differentiate themselves absolutely from one another and refer themselves incessantly to one another.” In this way, each entity, from a solar system to a microbe, is caught between “withdrawal” and “belonging,” the conjunction of which is only perceptible aesthetically.”

“Kant has the last word on the speculative-realist trouncing of his legacy. As Shaviro skillfully demonstrates, the non-cognitive feelings between entities that Whitehead calls aesthetic are already anticipated by Kant in the “Analytic of the Beautiful.” Read through Deleuze, Shaviro forcefully shows how judgments of beauty precede cognition and do not have a concept adequate to them. “Beauty,” Shaviro insists, “involves an immediate excess of sensation: something that stimulates thinking but that cannot be contained in, or expressed by, any particular thought.”

“With the help of Deleuze and Whitehead, Shaviro sees in Kant the recipe for an aesthetics that is not the mere privilege of certain human minds, but a fact of the material universe as such; aesthetic experience is immanent to the world, not above it, reflecting on it.”