Didier Debaise

Reinstituting Nature—A Latourian Workshop

Didier Debaise, Pablo Jensen, M. Pierre Montebello, Nicolas Prignot, Isabelle Stengers and Aline Wiame Debaise: Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium; Jensen: Institut des Systemes Complexes, Universite de Lyon, France; Montebello: Departement de Philosophie, Universite de Toulouse II, France; Prignot, Stengers and Wiame: Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres, Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium

The emergence of a speculative empiricism : Whitehead reading Bergson

The main purpose of this chapter is to make sense of the homage Whitehead paid to Bergson in his preface to Process and Reality: ‘I am also greatly indebted to Bergson, William James, and John Dewey.’1 There are many readers, particularly in France, who have seen this as attesting to a continuity between the two philosophers.2 This impression seems all the more justified given the similar homage Whitehead had earlier paid Bergson in The Concept of Nature: ‘I believe that in this doctrine I am in full accord with Bergson, though he uses “time” for the fundamental fact which I call the “passage of nature”.’3 These declarations would seem to point to a similar movement, a shared orientation in thought, which, even if expressed using different concepts, nevertheless derived from the same intuition. The same vision, it is supposed, connects Creative Evolution and Process and Reality, according to which, as Bergson writes, we understand, we feel, that reality is a perpetual growth, a creation pursued without end’.4 Certainly, the terms differ: where Bergson refers to duration, vital force and the event, Whitehead, in Process and Reality, prefers to speak of becoming, creativity and actual entities. But a common trajectory seems to extend beyond the divergent vocabulary.

The lure of the possible: On the function of speculative propositions

Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.