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Making Sense in Common: A Reading of Whitehead in Times of Collapse
A leading philosopher seeks to recover “common sense” as a meeting place to reconcile science and philosophy
With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead.
Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.
With her previous books on Alfred North Whitehead, Isabelle Stengers not only secured a reputation as one of the premier philosophers of our times but also inspired a rethinking of critical theory, political thought, and radical philosophy across a range of disciplines. Here, Stengers unveils what might well be seen as her definitive reading of Whitehead.
Making Sense in Common will be greeted eagerly by the growing group of scholars who use Stengers’s work on Whitehead as a model for how to think with conceptual precision through diverse domains of inquiry: environmentalism and ecology, animal studies, media and technology studies, the history and philosophy of science, feminism, and capitalism. On the other hand, the significance of this new book extends beyond Whitehead. Instead, it lies in Stengers’s recovery of the idea of “common sense” as a meeting place—a commons—where opposed ideas of science and humanistic inquiry can engage one another and help to move society forward. Her reconciliation of science and philosophy is especially urgent today—when climate disaster looms all around us, when the values of what we thought of as civilization and modernity are discredited, and when expertise of any kind is under attack.
- GenresPhilosophy
224 pages, Hardcover
Published March 28, 2023
13 people are currently reading
94 people want to read
About the author
Isabelle Stengers
113 books150 followersIsabelle Stengers is the author of many books on the philosophy of science, and is Professor of Philosophy at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
August 17, 2025
One of Stengers' readers, in her debt, I take it, is Didier Debaise, whose fine book on Whiteheadian eternal objects is Nature as Event, from 2017, that may be compared to this other, more recent primer on Whitehead -- Stengers' is the much more public-facing text, focused as it gets to be on the nature of environmental activism from Stengers' customarily Whiteheadian standpoint.
I mention these items because so much of what one reads about Whitehead on Goodreads is commentary on him without having read him. Rather shamelessly so at times.
Granted, Process and Reality, Whitehead's Gifford Lectures, his masterwork, is a difficult text. But thereafter one ought to be able to make one's way thoughtfully through the rest of his oeuvre, without fear of bogging down. Part of it is that Whitehead writes in a recondite area, the philosophy of science, and when Stengers writes at full pitch, she too, speculates as to what science is or does. In particular, from Stengers, I find confirmation that the crucial Whitehead texts for the in-need-of-being-initiated Whiteheadians are The Concept of Nature (1920), from which we have ANW's "Nature is nothing else but the deliverance of sense-awareness," as aphorism; Science and the Modern World, (the Lowell Lectures from 1925) which, when I finished reading it in 1995, I immediately turned around and re-read (I might be ready for a re-up); and perhaps his greatest work, surely his last, Modes of Thought (1938).
Stengers endeavors to offer Whitehead a 21rst century commentary. Its topics, near as I suss them are as follows: Stengers would recuperate a Whitehead available to common sense (a sense for the commons), since in the historical terms of the post-Darwinian sciences, it will be Whitehead we need (we needed) to resist the public blowback against evolutionary skepticism. For Stengers, Whitehead's post-Darwinism is always in movement, since "Evolution does not produce species that remain fixed." Just so, "there's no stable definition of common sense any more than there is fixed identity to the human species." (7) Common sense resists all grounds of consensus ("science" [reified to] being such a consensus of observers), for as Stengers says, "There's no way to define a common sense that would allow us to ground consensus, nor one that we would have to resist." Stengers, like the author of Science and the Modern World,, for whom it was the romantic poets who "brooded" enough to resist 18thC consensua over critical thinking, develops a "speculative means [for] dramatizing what goes without saying when we say something." (6)
What speculates is just this brooding resistance to the gestures of application that abstraction becomes in the sciences, and none more than a master trope of sententiousness itself, Whitehead's identification of "the bifurcation of nature," originally noted in the 1920 lectures, and a crucial trope in the last two decades of his life. As Stengers points out, Whitehead rather vigilantly evaded historicizing this phrase meant to mark the shift in the West's thought about nature. What is it, then? It is, or so it seems, a "natural" conflation to assume that "the objectivity obtained in the lab is the same" objectivity as the one "we use to silence so-called subjective judgments." (48) Our resistance to this so-called nature as it gets bifurcated is one thing that Stengers proposes that a "brooding . . . negative capability" would achieve. She also concerns herself to keep the sciences unperturbed by the definitions and reifications of a dictate Science. Research questions are not issue questions -- a creed with which I bore my writing students. What gets "bifurcated" too easily is the value in forms of knowledge. We know, through common sense, to keep options "live". Finally, Stengers offers again her "account of the 6th Day," which lecture she's been delivering around universities (including Washington University) for 20-odd years.
So these are some of her concerns. I have myself occluded her rich text-to-world applications of Whitehead to our environmental moment -- as her subtitle has it: Reading Whitehead in Times of Collapse.
I mention these items because so much of what one reads about Whitehead on Goodreads is commentary on him without having read him. Rather shamelessly so at times.
Granted, Process and Reality, Whitehead's Gifford Lectures, his masterwork, is a difficult text. But thereafter one ought to be able to make one's way thoughtfully through the rest of his oeuvre, without fear of bogging down. Part of it is that Whitehead writes in a recondite area, the philosophy of science, and when Stengers writes at full pitch, she too, speculates as to what science is or does. In particular, from Stengers, I find confirmation that the crucial Whitehead texts for the in-need-of-being-initiated Whiteheadians are The Concept of Nature (1920), from which we have ANW's "Nature is nothing else but the deliverance of sense-awareness," as aphorism; Science and the Modern World, (the Lowell Lectures from 1925) which, when I finished reading it in 1995, I immediately turned around and re-read (I might be ready for a re-up); and perhaps his greatest work, surely his last, Modes of Thought (1938).
Stengers endeavors to offer Whitehead a 21rst century commentary. Its topics, near as I suss them are as follows: Stengers would recuperate a Whitehead available to common sense (a sense for the commons), since in the historical terms of the post-Darwinian sciences, it will be Whitehead we need (we needed) to resist the public blowback against evolutionary skepticism. For Stengers, Whitehead's post-Darwinism is always in movement, since "Evolution does not produce species that remain fixed." Just so, "there's no stable definition of common sense any more than there is fixed identity to the human species." (7) Common sense resists all grounds of consensus ("science" [reified to] being such a consensus of observers), for as Stengers says, "There's no way to define a common sense that would allow us to ground consensus, nor one that we would have to resist." Stengers, like the author of Science and the Modern World,, for whom it was the romantic poets who "brooded" enough to resist 18thC consensua over critical thinking, develops a "speculative means [for] dramatizing what goes without saying when we say something." (6)
What speculates is just this brooding resistance to the gestures of application that abstraction becomes in the sciences, and none more than a master trope of sententiousness itself, Whitehead's identification of "the bifurcation of nature," originally noted in the 1920 lectures, and a crucial trope in the last two decades of his life. As Stengers points out, Whitehead rather vigilantly evaded historicizing this phrase meant to mark the shift in the West's thought about nature. What is it, then? It is, or so it seems, a "natural" conflation to assume that "the objectivity obtained in the lab is the same" objectivity as the one "we use to silence so-called subjective judgments." (48) Our resistance to this so-called nature as it gets bifurcated is one thing that Stengers proposes that a "brooding . . . negative capability" would achieve. She also concerns herself to keep the sciences unperturbed by the definitions and reifications of a dictate Science. Research questions are not issue questions -- a creed with which I bore my writing students. What gets "bifurcated" too easily is the value in forms of knowledge. We know, through common sense, to keep options "live". Finally, Stengers offers again her "account of the 6th Day," which lecture she's been delivering around universities (including Washington University) for 20-odd years.
So these are some of her concerns. I have myself occluded her rich text-to-world applications of Whitehead to our environmental moment -- as her subtitle has it: Reading Whitehead in Times of Collapse.
September 24, 2023
Un libro bastante, bastante malo, en la línea de los demás de Stengers. Me parece bastante fuerte que una filósofa de renombre sea capaz de una escritura tan lineal, anodina y desalmada. Lo único destacable del libro son los conceptos de dispositivo generador y las últimas cincuenta páginas, que son un poco más entretenidas. La verdad es que deja en un lugar pésimo a Whitehead, que en teoría es un "salvaje creador de conceptos" y, a decir verdad, estos son una vez más terriblemente convencionales -en el sentido doble que no expresan ideas nuevas y no suponen una invención lingüística o rotura de convención. En fin, en algún momento intentaré leer su magna opus, "Pensar con Whitehead", pero tengo muchísimas dudas de ser capaz de tal hazaña.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews