On the Korean translation of Without Criteria

Remarks for the Korean translation of Without Criteria

Steven Shaviro

I would like to thank Galmuri Press for publishing a Korean translation of my book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics. This is the third book of mine that Galmuri Press has had translated. Without Criteria was first published, in English, in 2009. It has been a good while since I have looked at it; but in a very real sense, this book provided the grounds for everything that I have written since.

Without Criteria has two major aims. On the one hand, it is an effort to understand the philosophy of Alfred North Whithead, and to put this philosophy in contact with the “post-structualist” thought of French philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, as typified for me by the writings of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and especially Gilles Deleuze. On the other hand, and at the same time, the book endeavors to make a case for aesthetics, rather than ethics or metaphysics, as “first philosophy.”

Alfred North Whitehead was a British mathematician and philosopher; he was born in 1861, and died in 1947. He passed through several distinct stages in the course of his intellectual career. Whitehead started out as a mathematician, and taught at Cambridge University in the UK starting in 1884. He became especially interested in the foundations of mathematics - the question of how we could be sure that mathematics was correct. This phase of his research culminated in his collaboration with Bertrand Russell on Principia Mathematica (1901-1911), a massive effort to ground mathematics in symbolic logic. This project did not succeed; it was later proven, by Kurt Gödel and others, that it could not succeed. Gödel showed, in the early 1930s, that any logical system generates propositions that can neither be proved nor disproved within that system. You will never find a counterexample to such a proposition, but you cannot establish its truth rigorously either. This means that mathematics cannot be systematically grounded; no mathematical system can be both complete and consistent. Whitehead perhaps had a certain intuition of this; several decades before Gödel published his proof, Whitehead gave up on his quest for logical certainty.

In 1910, along with his abandonment of symbolic logic, Whitehead left Cambridge, and moved to London. For the next fourteen years, he worked as both a teacher and an administrator in various units of the University of London system. During these years, Whitehead was deeply involved in reform of the British higher education system. At the time, this meant two things. The first was opening previously all-male programs to women. The second was adding modern topics to the humanities curriculum, instead of just focusing on the classics (ancient Greek and Latin).

During this period, Whitehead became interested in the philosophical foundations of physics. When Whitehead first entered the Univeristy system in the 1880s, physicists believed that they understood the basic outlines of how the universe worked. But anomalous results, connected with astronomical observations and with the discovery of radioactivity, destroyed this consensus by the end of the nineteenth century. The science was thrown into crisis. The first few decades of the twentieth century witnessed a revolution in physics, with the development of quantum mechanics, and of Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity. Whitehead closely observed these developments, He became deeply concerned with the question of how these indubitable but counterintuitive discoveries could be related to our everyday commonsensical experience of the world. The astronomer Arthur Eddington, a one-time student of Whitehead, noted the disjunction between the way that a physical object appears to immediate sensory experience, and to common sense more generally, and the way that the same object is understood by modern physics. Whitehead sought to bridge this disparity, since after all it is only through empirical experience in the first place that we can get the data upon which the scientific understanding of the physical world is based. In trying to answer this question, Whitehead published his first important philsophical books: An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge (1919), The Concept of Nature (1920), The Principle of Relativity (1922), and Science and the Modern World (1924).

Gradually, in the course of these writings, Whitehead’s attention shifted from the philosophy of science in particular to more general philosophical questions. The split between common-sense and scientific understandings of objects, he came to believe, was only one example of a much deeper problem. Whitehead diagnosed what he called the bifurcation of nature in modern Western culture. This is the division between phenomenal experience and the physical explanation of such experience. On the one hand, we have, for instance, “the greenness of the trees, the song of the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the velvet.” On the other hand, we have “the conjectured system of molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of apparent nature.” These two sets of relations seem to have nothing in common. Whitehead deplores such a bifurcation at the heart of nature, and seeks for ways to heal this split.

The bifurcation of nature is arguably still a crucial problem for us today, despite all the changes, and technological advances, that have taken place in the century since Whitehead’s time. Scientific and humanistic accounts of the world remain at odds with one another today. One of the ways that we experience this bifurcation, in the United States at least, is in the form of the division in our universities between STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and everything else, including especially what used to be called the humanities. The STEM subjects continue to be emphasized, while the humanities are progressively defunded. Within Anglo-American philosophy in particular, the bifurcation of nature takes the form of the distinction between the “analytic” and “continental” schools. Continental thought, including phenomenology, starts out from the immediate sensations of subjective experience. Analytic philosophy, on the other hand, starts out from questions of logic, as well as from the molecules and electrons that are the causal basis of any subjective experience.

In order to overcome the bifurcation of nature, Whitehead delved ever more deeply into metaphysical – or what he called cosmological – questions. This broadening of focus was enabled when, in 1924, at the age of 63, Whitehead was invited to join the philosophy department of Harvard University. Whitehead was pleased to be offered a position in the very program where his favorite philosopher, William James, had once taught. And so he left Great Britain, and moved to the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1929, while he was teaching at Harvard, Whitehead published his magnum opus, the vast and dazzling book Process and Reality. In the following decade, he published two more important books: Adventures of Ideas in 1933, and Modes of Thought in 1938. In these texts, Whitehead develops his own philosophcial system, which refers back to the major trends in Western philosophy from Descartes through Kant, but which also departs from those trends in important ways. Whitehead even suggests that his philosophy “seems to approximate more to some strains of Indian, or Chinese, thought, than to western Asiatic, or European, thought.” I know too little of Asian philosophy to be able to judge the truth of this suggestion, but I mention it for your interest.

Whitehead finally retired from teaching in 1937, at the age of 76. He remained in America until he died a decade later. His influence faded considerably, however, in the years following his death. For much of the later twentieth century, Whitehead was largely ignored in Western philosophical circles. His legacy was kept alive only by a small group of Protestant and Catholic theologians, most notably John B. Cobb (who recently celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday, but is still intellectually active).

Part of the reason for the decline of Whitehead’s influence in the later twentieth century is because his philosophy remains something of an anomaly in the general climate of Anglo-American academia. Whitehead’s thought does not fit well into either the analytic or the continental tradition. His early work on logic and mathematics had a strong influence on analytic philosophy, primarily through Bertrand Russell. In addition, W. V. O. Quine, one of the most important analytic thinkers, wrote his Ph D dissertation, which focused on the Principia Mathematica, under Whitehead’s supervision. But Whitehead’s later thought moves far away from logical and mathematical basics. The major themes of Whitehead’s later philosophy – fundamental questions about time and space and the nature of human and nonhuman existence – have more in common with the concerns of continental philosophy. But Whitehead is quite far from any of the major figures of the continental tradition: Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Indeed, he seems not to have ever read any of them, and his thought differs from theirs in both vocabulary and focus. Rather than favoring either side of the analytic/continental divide, Whitehead seeks to develop an inclusive position that finds room for both approaches, and places them both on an equal footing.

In addition, Whitehead is fairly unique in the twentieth century in his attitude towards the very process of doing philosophy. Most twentieth-century Western thinkers – like Wittgenstein and Carnap on the analytic side, as well as Heidegger and Derrida on the continental side – are concerned above all with eliminating metaphysics, or extricating thought from metaphysics. For both sides, metaphysics is identified with delusion and mystification. Whitehead, to the contrary, never denounces or seeks to escape from metaphysics. Instead, he continues to describe what he does as metaphysics – or more often, as cosmology. In presenting his thought in this way, Whitehead runs the risk – already in his own time, and all the more so today, a century later – of making his philosophy sound old-fashioned and out of date. However, I am more inclined to see Whitehead’s continuing commitment to metaphysics and cosmology as an implicit rebuke to the unacknowledged (and indeed unconscious) parochialism of Western modernity, which fancied itself completely new, and completely disentangled from the past.

Western modernism, in the earlier twentieth century, certainly saw itself as a moment of extreme rupture. As Virginia Woolf famously wrote, not entirely ironically, in an essay from 1924: “on or about December 1910, human character changed… All human relations have shifted – those between masters and servants, husbands and wives, parents and children. And when human relations change there is at the same time a change in religion, conduct, politics and literature.” But Whitehead himself seems to have experienced this rupture more in terms of the revolutions in physics than in terms of the changes in human relations, and through them of literature, art, and culture more generally. Whitehead was friends with the great American modernist experimental writer Gertrude Stein, but otherwise he does not seem to have connections with modernist art and culture. Whitehead’s aesthetics places great stress on novelty, but he develops this aesthetics in a way that is not specifically bound to the cultural ferment of his own time.

Nonetheless, there has been something of a revival in Whitehead studies starting at the end of the last century, and continuing into the present one. Gilles Deleuze briefly discussed Whitehead in his book on Leibniz (The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, published in French in 1988, and translated into English in 1993). Slightly later, important books on Whitehead were published by Judith Jones (Intensity: An Essay in Whiteheadian Ontology, published in 1998) and by Isabelle Stengers (Thinking with Whitehead: A Free and Wild Creation of Concepts, which first appeared in French in 2002, and was translated into English in 2011). It is largely due to Isabelle Stengers’ writings that I myself first started reading Whitehead. My interest in his thought may be unusual, since I am not a philosopher, but rather a scholar of cinema, on the one hand, and of science fiction literature, on the other. I was also trained, as a graduate student, in the thought of such post-structuralist thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. And so it is in the context of these thinkers, together with Stengers, that I first came to read, and tried to understand, Whitehead.

In Without Criteria, I pay special attention to the surprising and unexpected affinities between Whitehead’s thought and that of Gilles Deleuze. These two thinkers may seem very different at first glance. But they both see the world as composed of open multiplicities. Both of them tell us that these multiplicities are finite but ongoing processes, rather than fixed underlying substances. Instead of presupposing any sort of pre-given stability, both thinkers try to work out the ways in which relative fixities – more or less stable selves and things – are able to emerge out of chaos, and maintain themselves, at least for a certain amount of time.

Whitehead accomplishes this, in part, by rejecting what he calls “the subject-predicate forms of thought” that have dominated Western philosophy since Aristotle. That is to say, according to Whitehead the world is not composed of separare substances, to which various qualities can be attributed. The world is made of processes, rather than of things; it is better described by verbs and adverbs than by nouns and adjectives. Rather than saying that the wall in front of me is painted red, I should more accurately speak of the ongoing reddening that reaches my eyeballs and affects my senses, and the ongoing process of resisting collapse amd holding the building together that we might well call the action of walling. The point, however, is not to reform our modes of speech, but rather to grasp how even the most stable, and seemingly unchanging, things are still involved in continual processes of becoming.

Think of how an eddy forms in a stream, and maintains its whirlpool motion, even as the water streaming through it continually flows away and is replaced. And then, think of the way that we, as biological organisms, maintain and renew our bodies and minds for the entire stretch of our lives. My seeming identity from one moment to the next is the result of an unending progression of intertwined metabolic processes, which will continue until I die. The stream is a fairly simple physical structure, while living organisms like ourselves are extremely complex ones. But streams and biological organisms alike are instances of what Ilya Prigogine calls dissipative systems: structures that maintain themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium. In all of such systems, organization and relative stability arise out of processes of continual change.

This is even the case for seemingly fixed physical objects. Whitehead gives us the example of Cleopatra’s Needle, an Egyptian stone obelisk that now stands on the Victoria Embankment in central London, on the bank of the river Thames. (It is one of a pair; its twin stands in Central Park in New York CIty). The pillar was originally erected in Heliopolis, in ancient Egypt, in the fifteenth century BC. It was moved from Heliopolis to Alexandria in the first century BC. And it was plundered and taken from Alexandria to London in 1877 AD, where it remains to this day. Whitehead reminds us that even this seemingly solid stone pillar is not really unchanging. This is partly because of human histories of imperialism and colonialism, which led to the column’s being moved several times over the course of millennia. In addition, Whitehead points out, the physicist knows that the pillar is caught up in a continual “dance of electrons,” so that “daily it has lost some molecules and gained others, and even the plain man can see that it gets dirtier and is occasionally washed.” And at some date in the far future – if not sooner – the pillar is bound to be toppled or eroded away. Just give it enough time. Everything everywhere is continually in process, even if in some cases the ongoing events are too slow, or too widely distributed over space and time, for us to perceive them all at once. How a relative stability emerges from continual change is a major concern for both Whitehead and Deleuze. Both thinkers anticipate late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century interests in questions of emergence, and of the production of novelty.

Most important of all, from my own particular perspective, is the way that Whitehead and Deleuze alike place aesthetics at the center of their philosophies. This is what links them to Immanuel Kant, whose third volume of critique, The Critique of Judgment, is the foundational discussion of aesthetics in modern Western thought. Kant subordinates aesthetics both to epistemology (the subject of the first critique, The Critique of Pure Reason) and to morality (the subject of the second critique, The Critique of Practical Reason); but in doing so he opens up the aesthetic as a realm of exceptions, or of particular instances, that cannot be run together and generalized. Each aesthetic instance is unique. In its sheer singularity, aesthetic enjoyment escapes the strictures both of empirical understanding and of moral law.

In Kant’s account, an aesthetic feeling is different from an empirical fact, and it is also different from a judgment of right and wrong. For Kant, both facts and moral judgments are objectively universal: they must be the same for everyone, without exception. Aesthetic judgments, however, are different; they are always singular. I would very much like for everyone to share my sense of the greatness of the novels of Ursula Le Guin, the films of R. W. Fassbinder, the symphonic music of Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and the music videos of Tierra Whack. But I cannot justify my feelings about these works, much less convice other people about them, by appealing either to empirical facts or to moral necessities.

This is why my book argues that aesthetic judgments, in contrast to empirical or moral ones, exist without criteria. I deeply care about the works I love, and I ask others to share my feelings; in this way aesthetic judgment strives towards universality. But at best, this is merely a subjective universality – which should not be confused with objective universality. I can explain in great detail why and how I love these particular works, and the ways in which I find them valuable and moving. I can point out features of these works that other readers, viewers, or listeners might not have notice. Indeed, doing all this is precisely my job as a teacher, and as a cultural critic. But Kant warns me that I cannot logically prove to anyone who does not already share my taste that they should feel about these works of art in the same way that I do. Kant says that we can argue about aesthetic judgments, but we cannot dispute about them. That is to say, however eloquently and vehemently I express my aesthetic tastes, I cannot demonstrate those tastes logically, and I cannot appeal to objective grounds to justify them.

To my mind, Kant’s discussion of aesthetics is one of the most important aspects of his philosophy – even though it is usually given less prominence than his arguments about knowledge (in the First Critique) and about morality (in the Second Critique). Part of Kant’s point is that, because great works of art are unique or singular, they cannot give rise to categories of the understanding (which regulate empirical knowledge), and they cannot be the foundation of commands or imperatives (which ground morality).

This also means, according to Kant, that great works of art cannot really be imitated; any attempt to do so results in works that are unconvicing failures. Rather, Kant says, great works of art are exemplary. This means that they can be emulated, but not successfully imitated. Original works can inspire new works that do not imitate them (which would not be original), but that instead strive to follow their example, by trying be original in their own turn. The argument of Without Criteria is that both Whitehead and Deleuze take Kantian aesthetic practice – grounded in examples and in emulation – and apply this practice in the very realms of metaphysical speculation from which Kant excluded them. Aesthetics is no longer an exception to the rules of epistemology and ethics, but instead becomes the very ground for their practices.

That is to say, my claim is that both Whitehead and Deleuze take up Kant’s aesthetic exceptionalism in a radical way. They push Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment to an extreme point that would probably have horrified Kant himself, but that is nonetheless still derived from Kant’s own formulations. Whitehead’s cosmology begins with what he calls actual occasions, and Deleuze’s account of being begins with what he calls singularities. Both of these would be regarded by Kant as aesthetic exceptions to the grounding concepts of the understanding, and to the imperatives of moral law. But Whitehead and Deleuze alike argue that such aesthetic instances come first. It is not that they diverge from pre-existing norms, but the reverse: it is only on the basis of such unruly instances, and by aggregating them, that the norms to which they fail to conform can be retroactively posited.

Whitehead explains his project most explicitly when he describes his ambition “to construct a critique of pure feeling, in the philosophical position in which Kant put his Critique of Pure Reason.” In this way, feeling not only precedes rational thought, but also provides the necessary basis for any articulation of rationality. Whitehead adds that “this should also supersede the remaining Critiques required in the Kantian philosophy.” This does not mean that blind feeling should replace rational cognition, but rather that feeling is the necessary basis upon which cognition can be developed. This is confirmed by recent research on the brain; for instance, the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that people whose emotions have been stunted are unable to make rational decisions.

For Whitehead, therefore, truths and obligations must themselves be articulated upon the basis of feelings – which means, within an aesthetic framework. As for Deleuze, at one early point in his career he describes his short book on Kant “as a book on an enemy.” But later on, Deleuze credits Kant, and particularly the Kant of the Critique of Judgment, with “four poetic formulas” that liberate Time from its subordination to movement and to measure. This again takes us well beyond the limitations established in the first two Critiques. While Kant attempted to legislate the limits of thought in the first two Critiques, in his final, aesthetic Critique he gives us instead what Deleuze describes as “a tempest in the depths of a chasm opened up in the subject,” an atonal music of pure feeling.

These are the issues that I attempted to explore in my book Without Criteria. The aim of the book is not to come to definitive conclusions, but to open up new paths for intellectual and affective exploration. And these are the paths that lead me to the work of my subsequent books, that deal with such things as science fiction novels and music videos.