The Lure of Whitehead is an anthology edited by Nicholas Gaskill and A.J. Nocek, comprising several authors’ angles, views and perception of Alfred North Whiteheads speculative philosophy. So far I’ve read the introduction by Gaskill and Nocek, and the chapter A Constructivist Reading of Process and Reality by Isabelle Stengers.
The ‘lure’ of the book is two-fold in my perspective: first of all it comments on and breaks down the coherent and – to me – rather inaccessible philosophy and thinking of Whitehead. Secondly, it puts Whitehead into a larger frame of things, history of philosophy, creativity, language, coherence, contemporary theory and so on.
So far the book has made me think about thinking things through, dwelling on it, following patterns of thought, putting new abstractions forward, and generally, stay on a topic for a long period of time. To phrase the book, to have “adventures of hope”. (p. 9)
The book has also affirmed my conviction that no experience should be ignored (which, to me, fits in well with the concept of ‘thinking things through’, i.e. ‘hard thinking’) and that you shouldn’t divide experience in:
“…the really real world of primary qualities, molecules, and energy fields, and the only apparently real world of secondary qualities and sensory experiences, the embellishments of our minds make upon the world. Whitehead protested against this division as untenable and spent the rest of his career framing a system of thought capable of putting every aspect of experience – from the insights of science to the intimations of the poets – “in the same boat” (CN, 148)” (p. 3).As a general method of perceiving a coherent world and creatively creating modes of thought the philosophy of Whitehead is very usable, but I still cannot say with clarity how the book can be applied to my particular fields of interest: pedagogy, anthropology, organisational analysis and so on. I hope the reading of the The Lure of Whitehead – along with reading Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas (the two book by Whitehead currently on my shelves) will enable this application more clearly.