Abstract
Geographic theorisations of the ‘non-’ or ‘more-than-human’ continue to play a significant role in disrupting anthropocentrism within the humanities and social sciences. This article explores how Alfred North Whitehead's philosophy can contribute to geography's more-than-human aspirations, focussing on his radically non-anthropocentric theory of experience. Situating his work within geography's recent speculative turn, I unpack the implications of Whitehead's philosophy in relation to three key areas of concern in more-than-human geographies, namely new materialism, affect theory, and (neo-)vitalism. In doing so, I show how geographical critiques of anthropocentric thinking stand to gain from a deeper engagement with Whitehead's work.
Introduction
Building on its well-developed capacity for troubling the assumed ontological distinction between nature and society, human geography scholarship has, over many years, opened-up new possibilities for understanding ourselves and our relationship to the world in less anthropocentric terms. Whether it be through developing an enhanced conceptual appreciation of animal subjectivities (Van Patter, 2022), vegetal agencies (Lawrence, 2022), technical capacities (Keating, 2023), or material forces (Cook, 2018), those working within this broad church of ‘non-’ or ‘more-than-human’ (Whatmore, 2006) geographies have shown how the trap of anthropocentric thinking continues to place fundamental limits on our capacity to understand – and, moreover, to adequately respond to – many of the most pressing planetary issues of our time. From climate change and the threat of ecological collapse to the transformative impacts of new technologies like artificial intelligence, the issues we face today require a radical decentring of the human as the assumed starting point for thought. As geographer Susan Ruddick (2017: 119) persuasively and passionately argued in this very journal, the Anthropocene represents a time in which ‘[t]he ethical crisis is also an ontological crisis. It raises questions about our ethical response-ability to this world, calling for a rethinking of the human-nature divide’. To respond to such ecological crises requires, therefore, a philosophical interrogation of the basic ontological categories assumed by so-called modern thought, as a necessary precursor to acting and valuing differently in a more-than-human world.
In more recent years, this pressing need to situate social and cultural processes within the world's roiling materiality has, to a certain extent, become something that human geographers and other researchers within the humanities and social sciences can increasingly take for granted. While the motivating factors and conceptual frameworks associated with geography's more-than-human turn remain multiple, a key concern to have recently emerged and gained traction within these debates revolves around the possibility of developing alternatives to the established forms of ‘human exceptionalism’ (Sharp, 2011) that continue to shape contemporary thought in the humanities and social sciences (Anderson, 2014; Buller, 2014; Lawrence, 2022). The power of this critique lies in its capacity to assist geographers and other social scientists in re-imagining the contours of social and cultural inquiry from a radically new starting point, one that provokes us to be more tuned-in to the present push of the world's ontological entanglements because the question of what it means to act or to be an agent in this world – that is, to exhibit the capacity to make things happen – is no longer dependent on the happy accident of being human. This has led to a wide-ranging problematisation of the figure of the human subject as the assumed starting point for our analyses of social and cultural processes, with new materialist theorists such as Bennett (2004: 365) arguing instead that ‘humans are always in composition with nonhumanity, never outside a sticky web of connections or an ecology’.
As influential as these arguments have been, there remains a sense in which geography's focus on the distribution of agency beyond the monopoly of the willing subject falls somewhat short of its ambitions to think beyond the human. A key reason for this, I believe, is that it is in fact what we ordinarily think of as the subject's capacity for experience, rather than its capacity to act, that is largely responsible for shoring-up the persistent ontological fault-line separating human beings from the rest of nature. Notwithstanding the significant impact of Bennett's (2010) vital materialism on contemporary human geography debates (see Abrahamsson, 2011; Anderson, 2011; Braun, 2011; Gregson, 2011; Hall, 2022; Hinchliffe, 2011; Kane, 2023), it is perhaps not such a radical challenge to modern thought, therefore, to consider nonhuman things – or, indeed, matter itself – as possessing agency in and through relation. What tends to remain unquestioned, however, is the lingering assumption of an ontological rift separating the physical world of insentient matter from the inner worlds of experience traditionally reserved for human beings and other supposedly ‘higher’ organisms. To put the argument slightly differently, I contend that it is this supposed capacity for experience, rather than agency, that ontologically distinguishes certain kinds of beings as subjects within modern thought.
The following paper seeks to trouble this persistent ontological distinction between matter and experience by drawing on the speculative philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. In doing so, the article outlines the significance of Whitehead's philosophy as a means of building on geography's existing commitments to the philosophical and political project of decentring the human within its analyses of social and cultural life (Anderson, 2014). Writing in the early to mid-twentieth century, Whitehead sought an alternative to the prevailing scientific wisdom which stated that the basic constituents of the universe – indeed, of reality – could be reduced to the scientific abstraction of matter, understood as an extended substrate devoid of life, feeling, and experience. Instead of trying to explain the emergence of our inner worlds based on a concept of matter that was essentially devoid of experience, Whitehead's speculative metaphysics posited that, in order for the human's inner world to exist, there must be something akin to (human) experience dispersed throughout the most fundamental level of reality. Whitehead's philosophy thus provides a useful tool for human geographers interested in critically questioning the assumptions associated with human exceptionalism, because, unlike existing approaches that tend to focus on agency, it enables us to pose the question of the more-than-human at the level of experience itself, reimagined in ontological terms. Indeed, what Whitehead's philosophy shows is the extent to which a critique of human exceptionalism requires an understanding of experience itself in non- or more-than-human terms.
In framing this article as an intervention, my aim is to show how Whitehead's speculative account of experience might serve to inflect geography's more-than-human scholarship in ways that are both productive and exciting. Thus, while my underlying argument is framed largely in relation to new materialist theorisations of agency, my hope is that Whitehead's thought can serve as a source of inspiration across a broader community of more-than-human scholars. First and foremost, this article will show how Whitehead's universe of experience offers a radically supercharged vision of relational thought, where existence entails an ongoing involvement in the becoming of others. Whitehead's theorisation of experience as a processual vector of relation thus has much to offer geographers who are interested in prioritising relational entanglements over static categories such as ‘nature’ or ‘culture’ (Barua, 2021; Ginn, 2023; Steele et al., 2019). Furthermore, by re-thinking experience in ontological terms, Whitehead's thought provides a more capacious and conceptually ambitious account of what experience might look like beyond the human, with significant relevance to those interested in the otherness of more-than-human life (Law and Lien, 2017; Lorimer et al., 2019; Vannini and Vannini, 2020). Finally, to the extent that his theory of experience entails a thoroughgoing critique of the metaphysical assumptions associated with modern philosophy, Whitehead might also be of interest to those more-than-human scholars who are looking to deepen their engagements with non-Western and Indigenous ontologies (Raven et al., 2021; Wright et al., 2012; Yates, 2021). Here, a key strength of Whitehead's thought is that it enables us to better appreciate how Modernity's restrictive notion of experience forecloses more generous engagements with animistic and ontologically pluralistic modes of thought. 1
The relevance of Whitehead's philosophy to contemporary cultural geography is also underlined by a growing interest in speculation as a concept and in the ‘speculative’ as a methodological outlook or ethos for social science research, particularly amongst those currently engaged in re-thinking the human beyond the familiar subject–object framework (Williams and Keating, 2022). Following this introduction, I sketch out the conceptual motivations of Whitehead's self-proclaimed ‘speculative philosophy’ before briefly situating his thought in relation to existing accounts of experience in both human and more-than-human geography. Here, I underline how Whitehead shifts our understanding of experience from a phenomenological to an ontological register, in ways that might better enable more-than-human scholars to trouble the traditional distinction between the material and the experiential in modern modes of thought.
Following this, the next three sections turn in more detail to Whitehead's ontological account of experience, unpacking its relevance in relation to three key themes within contemporary human geography, namely materiality, affect, and life. In particular, I show how Whitehead's critique of scientific materialism challenges our most deeply held metaphysical preconceptions about materiality by inscribing experience throughout the physical universe. Next, I unpack the implications of Whitehead's thought for contemporary theorisations of affect, drawing attention to his notion of ‘non-sensuous perception’. Finally, I situate Whitehead's ontological theory of experience alongside geography's recent interest in vitalist philosophies. Here, I argue that Whitehead's philosophy invokes a kind of ‘affirmatory vitalism’, to the extent that the conditions of life are tied to the differential novelty inherent within his more-than-human account of experience. These findings are drawn together alongside broader implications in the paper's conclusion.
Whitehead's speculative philosophy of experience
In some senses, Whitehead's metaphysical concerns seem a long way from the world of human geography. Indeed, despite geography's reputation as a theoretically engaged and conceptually innovative discipline, Whitehead's thought has not been taken up to the same extent as the philosophical interventions associated with continental philosophy. 2 Derek McCormack's work is an important exception here, having acted as the principal conduit of Whiteheadian concepts in contemporary human geography over the past decade. Operating within the sphere of non-representational theory, McCormack has consistently turned to Whitehead's philosophy to re-think a variety of issues and concepts in human geography, including abstraction (McCormack, 2012), atmospheres (McCormack, 2018) and experiment (McCormack, 2010). Of particular relevance to this article is McCormack's interest in the expansive concept of experience that Whitehead inherits from the pragmatist philosophy of William James, in which experience, according to McCormack, forms ‘part of the ontogenetic materiality of nature’ (McCormack, 2010: 204). The significance of McCormack's contributions notwithstanding, there is still much to be said about the place of experience in Whitehead's speculative vision of reality and its implications for more-than-human geographers today.
The current relevance of Whitehead's thought is further signalled by the discipline's recent interest in speculation and ‘the speculative’ as a means of problematising those habits of thinking, knowing, and experiencing that tie social science inquiry to the limited purview of the human. In the introduction to their recent edited collection, entitled Speculative Geographies, cultural geographers Nina Williams and Thomas Keating explore the emerging wellspring of speculative approaches associated with recent interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and social sciences, from new materialism and speculative realism to perspectivism and decolonial modes of thought (2022: 9). To speculate, Williams and Keating (2022: 2) argue, requires an intensely practical commitment to the reinvention of thought through the production of new abstractions: ‘To ask what thought might become is to cultivate a mode of speculative thinking that is at odds with prophetic positions that are themselves only capable of answering questions posed from within the bounds of the contemporary regimes of knowledge production’. To this end, Whitehead's ‘free and wild creation of concepts’ (Stengers, 2011) provides a key touchstone for Williams and Keating (2022: 15), who note the significance of his speculative philosophy for problematising the ‘opposition between subjective knowledges and objective facts’, an opposition that remains baked into the metaphysics of Modernity and that continues to limit enquiry within the humanities and social sciences by parsing the human subject from an objective nature that it assumes is devoid of intrinsic value.
It is this assumption of a pernicious ‘bifurcation’ associated with the metaphysics of Modernity that served as the primary motivation for Whitehead's speculative endeavours, particularly his creative re-thinking of experience in more-than-human terms. But before we can unpack this novel understanding of experience in more detail, it is worth pausing to consider just how unfashionable speculative philosophy was as an intellectual pursuit during Whitehead's time. It is often commented upon that Whitehead came late to philosophy, having already enjoyed a successful career as a mathematician before taking up a post at Harvard as a lecturer in philosophy in 1924, aged 63 (Stengers, 2011: 4). It was here, at Harvard, that Whitehead finally embarked upon his ambitious program of speculative philosophy, much to the bemusement of many of his former colleagues. Bertrand Russell, a long-time colleague and collaborator, is said to have described the new, speculative Whitehead as ‘muddleheaded’ in his wilful abandonment of philosophy's analytic tradition (Robinson, 2009). Indeed, Whitehead's philosophy was thoroughly dismissed by analytic philosophers, who labelled it as ‘a regrettable return to the worst excesses of nineteenth-century speculative metaphysics’ (Robinson, 2009: 5). 3
And so, it is within this philosophical and historical context that Whitehead's speculative philosophy must be situated. As someone who took a keen interest in the latest developments of theoretical physics, Whitehead saw metaphysical speculation as a necessary accompaniment to the pursuit of scientific knowledge. He was particularly interested in Einstein's theories and even created his own alternative theory of relativity (Whitehead, 1922). The problem with science, Whitehead argued, lay in its outdated metaphysical assumptions regarding the fundamental building blocks of reality. Referred to by Whitehead (1925) as ‘scientific materialism’, this deeply held and widely unacknowledged understanding of reality was based on the notion that nature's fundamental building blocks consisted of lifeless chunks of matter, devoid of the kinds of secondary qualities that we humans enjoy in our everyday experience. For Whitehead, this led to interminable metaphysical problems and resulted in a vision of nature that was ‘bifurcated’ into two ontologically distinct realms: on the one hand, the physicists’ vision of objective reality as a realm of lifeless particles or ‘bare’ matter, and, on the other, a realm of subjective experience where the mind imparts qualities in the form of psychic additions (Lapworth, 2015). This bifurcation of nature underlies many of the dualisms that have become emblematic of modern thought (Debaise, 2017). It finds its apotheosis, however, in what has come to be termed the hard problem of consciousness (Chalmers, 1995), which is essentially a question of how we get from one side of the bifurcation (i.e. bare, insentient matter) to the other (i.e. the qualities of phenomenological experience).
Whitehead's identification of the bifurcation of nature is significant because it is what sets him on the path of metaphysical speculation. We are mistaken, he argues, in our repeated attempts to bridge the bifurcation by leaning on one realm (physical matter) to explain the other (phenomenological experience). To illustrate this point, Whitehead uses the example of a sunset. Viewed from the perspective of the bifurcation of nature, the experiential qualities of the sunset are explained by – indeed, are often explained away by – the more fundamental reality of lifeless particles posited by the scientific materialist. Whitehead's response is radically different, arguing that, if we approach the problem from a metaphysical standpoint, ‘the red glow of the sunset should be as much a part of nature as are the molecules and electric waves by which men [sic] of science would explain the phenomenon’ (1920: 29). Thus, if we are to avoid bifurcating nature into two ontologically disparate realms, we need to revise our metaphysical assumptions in such a way that the constituent parts of nature are no longer thought of as lifeless chunks of matter, devoid of the qualities associated with the human experience of the sunset. This is what the example of the sunset demands, namely a new metaphysics in which both the molecular physics and the warm glow of the event are written into the fundamental building blocks of reality. When it comes to metaphysics, Whitehead (1920) argues, we may not pick and choose: ‘everything perceived is in nature’ and it is the task of speculative philosophy to invent new ways of thinking that are sufficiently capacious to achieve this task.
The speculative wager that underwrites Whitehead's metaphysical adventure is that there is nothing inherently unknowable or unthinkable about reality. Everything that happens in Whitehead's universe can, in principle, be known, understood, and thought, because, as he argues in Process and Reality, ‘there is nothing which floats into the world from nowhere … everything in the actual world is referrable to some actual entity’ (1978: 244). In the case of the bifurcation of nature, the lack of understanding that Whitehead associates with ontological dualism stems from thought's reliance on outdated metaphysical categories and should not simply be accepted as a transcendent – that is, unthinkable – feature of reality. The only valid response to a lack of understanding is thus to reinvent the basic metaphysical assumptions that shape what it means to think, and, crucially, to evaluate the efficacy of our philosophical speculations through empirical experimentation. Thus, for Whitehead, the goal of metaphysics is not to arrive at a final list of dogmatic and/or esoteric statements concerning the ‘true’ nature of reality. Instead, Whitehead's approach is to think of the metaphysical systems or schemas invented through the practice of speculative philosophy as ‘giant scientific hypotheses to be tested against the bedrock of experienced reality’ (Basile, 2017: 18). On the one hand, then, we can think of Whitehead's speculative philosophy as a reinvention of what it means to think, characterised by what Williams and Keating (2022: 3) describe as a ‘sense of openness to what thought might become’. But it is also important to emphasise that this openness is empirically geared towards a greater understanding of reality as a continuum, where the vibrations of the most elementary physical particles and the complexities of conscious experience and thought express the same metaphysical principles – albeit in different ways. For Whitehead, the ultimate purpose of speculative philosophy is to produce better metaphysical frameworks that improve our understanding of the world and our place in it.
In the following three sections of the article, I focus in on what I see as the most significant implication of Whitehead's approach for contemporary geographical debates, namely, his conviction that our capacity to understand the human as a part of nature is hampered by the presupposition of an ontological distinction between, on the one hand, the physical world of insentient matter, and, on the other, the supposedly interior experiences that make up the phenomenological worlds of self-conscious beings. The speculative solution for moving past human exceptionalism, Whitehead argues, is to invent a radically non-anthropocentric concept of experience. At this point, it is worth pausing to consider the significance of experience as a concept that has been questioned, contested, and re-figured by human geographers in response to a variety of intellectual movements in the discipline's history. Of note here is the impact of phenomenology in its foregrounding of embodied experience as the fundamental starting point of geographical analysis (Relph, 1985; Seamon, 2015; Wylie, 2005). A key contribution made by human geographers in this area relates to the question of how experience is produced in relation to an environment, whether this be through critically phenomenology's sensitivity to relations of power and their differential enactment at the level of lived experience (Kinkaid, 2021; Simonsen, 2013), or, more recently, through post-phenomenological accounts of the various objects, interfaces and technologies that mediate experience in ways that extend beyond the representational frameworks of human meaning-making (Ash and Simpson, 2016; Gibas, 2019).
While a more comprehensive account of geography's shifting conceptualisations of experience lies beyond the scope of this intervention, I do want to emphasise here that the novelty of Whitehead's speculative approach in relation to these existing geographical debates lies in the way it shifts our understanding of experience from a phenomenological to an ontological register. For Whitehead, as we shall see, things simply are experience. This includes human beings, who are only able to ‘have’ experiences in a phenomenological sense to the extent that they, like everything else that exists, are composed of experience. There is thus a subtle point of distinction here between contemporary post-phenomenological approaches, which have successfully opened-up discussions about the more-than-human conditions of experience embodied in our technologically mediated environments, and Whitehead's speculative philosophy, which seeks to show how an ontological concept of experience can help us to think in ways that go beyond the unhelpful bifurcations of modern thought. In the three sections that follow, I flesh out the conceptual nuances of this novel approach to experience in greater detail and highlight its significance in relation to existing more-than-human concerns within the discipline, particularly those shaped by recent waves of new materialist thought. My contention is that our capacity to understand the human as a part of nature remains hampered by the presupposition of an ontological distinction between matter and experience, albeit in subtle ways. The value of Whitehead's thought for more-than-human geography lies, I believe, in its capacity to weaken the allure of this distinction through its radically non-anthropocentric concept of experience. With that, let us now take the speculative leap into Whitehead's universe.
Matter
Over the past decade, traditional conceptualisations of matter and materiality within humanities and social science disciplines have undergone a profound transformation in the wake of a variety of ‘new materialist’ theories and philosophies (Bennett, 2010; Braun and Whatmore, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010; Van der Tuin and Dolphijn, 2012). While they differ in their various approaches, new materialist theories share a renewed emphasis on the capacity, agency, or vitality of matter as a means of opposing the mechanistic reductivism traditionally associated with Cartesian metaphysics. Thus, according to Coole and Frost (2010: 7), the tendency to think of matter as a lifeless substrate remains ‘indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, and inert’. The new materialists have incorporated an array of philosophical perspectives to challenge Descartes’ assumption that, in a world of lifeless matter, it is the human alone who acts. Perhaps the most well-known resource here is Deleuze and Guattari's re-conceptualisation of matter as an immanent plane of machinic connections, but we might also include Bruno Latour's theory of actor-networks and, further back, Spinoza's concept of conatus as key conceptual touchstones that have shaped the new materialist concern with re-thinking agency beyond the human – and, indeed, beyond the living as it is conventionally defined (see Bennett, 2010).
Today's new materialist critiques bear remarkable similarities to Whitehead's own critique of the concept of lifeless matter associated with what he termed scientific materialism. 4 To recall, then, for Whitehead, scientific materialism refers to the metaphysical assumption that the basic building blocks that make up reality take the form of spatially extended ‘chunks’ of matter, colliding like billiard balls in the void of space (Roberts, 2014). This, Whitehead argues, is the metaphysical framework associated with the scientific advances of seventeenth-century Europe – hence the label, scientific materialism. And yet, as attested to by contemporary new materialisms, the tendency to think of matter in these reductive terms remains as a pervasive habit of thought today. Like today's new materialists, Whitehead argued that our capacity to understand life – and thus also mentality and thought – as immanent to nature depends upon the speculative invention of new ways of thinking about the physical world. What we need to move beyond, therefore, is the deeply held metaphysical suspicion that ‘[nature] is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly’ (Whitehead, 1925: 77).
While it is true that Whitehead and the new materialists share the same target – that is, an outdated metaphysical framework based on the mechanistic movements of lifeless matter – their responses are marked by a significant conceptual difference. For contemporary new materialists, what is required is a novel conceptual framework that enables a greater sensitivity towards the vitality or agency of all matter, including the world of non-living materials. According to Coole and Frost (2010: 9), then, new materialist approaches ‘often discern emergent, generative powers (or agentic capacities) even within inorganic matter, and they generally eschew the distinction between organic and inorganic, or animate and inanimate, at the ontological level’. Similarly, for Bennett (2010: viii), apprehending the vitality of matter is important if we are to adequately grasp ‘the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and design of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own’. In both of these examples, the emphasis is placed firmly on the agency of nonhuman materials as a means of disrupting the latent anthropocentrism characteristic of traditional social science enquiry. When all matter is seen as active or ‘agentic’, the distinction between human beings and nonhuman materials becomes more a difference in degree than in kind: this is the new materialist's post-humanist wager.
Whitehead's speculative approach is quite different. Instead of attributing agency to non-living matter, he responds to scientific materialism by positing drops of ‘experience’ – or, ‘feeling’ – as the ultimate metaphysical building blocks of reality. Whether inanimate matter or self-conscious organism, all that we encounter exists on an ontological continuum composed of these processual pulsations of experience. Thus, in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead (1933: 253) claims in his characteristically matter-of-fact style: ‘The actualities of the Universe are processes of experience, each process an individual fact. The whole Universe is the advancing assemblage of these processes’. Similarly, in Chapter 2 of Process and Reality, Whitehead (1978: 18) argues that: …though there are gradations of importance, and diversities of function, yet in the principles which actuality exemplifies all are on the same level. The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.
What Whitehead is grasping at here is a concept of experience that is far broader and more ontologically capacious than the kind of conscious experience normally familiar to human beings. The final facts are occasions of experience, with or without the presence of perception, cognition, or thought. And yet, there is a sense in which, for Whitehead, even the very highest dimensions of human experience must be understood as amplifications of processes that are themselves distributed throughout the non-living universe. Indeed, this is what thinking the human as part of a continuum of nature demands, because ‘any doctrine which refuses to place human experience outside nature, must find in descriptions of human experience factors which also enter into the descriptions of less specialized natural occurrences’ (Whitehead, 1933: 237). It is in this sense, then, that Whitehead's philosophy points to some problematic limitations of today's new materialist approaches: these contemporary approaches set the bar for conceptualising the ontological continuity of nature too low by focusing on nonhuman agency as the means for critiquing human exceptionalism. Moreover, by relying on a livelier concept of matter as their metaphysical bedrock, the new materialists fail to provide a convincing argument for how this matter, however lively it may be, can become something that not only acts on its surroundings but also experiences the world – and, in rare instances, becomes self-conscious.
What, then, does Whitehead mean by experience if it is not reducible to human experience? First and foremost, experience does not require a self-conscious subject; indeed, for the most part, experience takes place without any form of conscious discernment whatsoever. As Whitehead explains (1978: 267), consciousness vividly illuminates a small focal region of experience: it is ‘the crown of experience, only occasionally attained, not its necessary base’. In the case of human experience, the clarity provided by consciousness often blinds us to the insistence of ‘a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension’ (1978). I will return to the question of human experience in more detail in the fourth section, but, for now, it is important to note that in distinguishing experience from consciousness, Whitehead invites us to consider the existence of radically nonhuman, indeed perhaps even non-living forms of experience that take shape in the absence of consciousness. Examples that Whitehead (1978: 176) provides here include the jellyfish, a seemingly insentient organism that nonetheless ‘advances and withdraws, and in doing so exhibits some perception of causal relationship beyond itself’, as well as plants, which ‘grow downwards to the damp earth, and upwards towards the light’ without the aid of highly developed sense organs. Even electrons, Whitehead (1978: 177) argues, can be thought of as ‘primitive organisms’ to the extent that they enfold aspects of their environments. Moreover, while this kind of experience lacks the clarity of discernment typically associated with consciousness, Whitehead stresses that this in no way detracts from its richness and complexity. In his own words: ‘The simplicity of clear consciousness is no measure of the complexity of complete experience’ (1978: 267).
The very idea of a mode of experience that is all-the-more rich and all-the-more complex in its non-consciousness is, admittedly, a bemusing one given the breadth of experiential data that human beings are receptive to as self-conscious beings. Whitehead's response is that the richness and complexity of experience is emotional before it is consciously perceptual or cognitive (1933: 225). Thus, Whitehead speaks of the basic fact of experience as being constituted by ‘throbs of emotional energy’ (1978: 116) and their processual transference from past to future through the concrescence of occasions in the present. By prioritising its emotional dimensions, Whitehead's philosophy develops a concept of experience that not only extends beyond the human, but also takes us beyond the nervous systems of biological organisms. Science's model for this processual flux of emotional experience is, Whitehead (1933: 239) argues, the physics of energy: The notion of physical energy, which is at the base of physics, must then be conceived as an abstraction from the complex energy, emotional and purposeful, inherent in the subjective form of the final synthesis in which each occasion completes itself.
Affect
Whitehead's assertion that the fundamental building blocks of reality are occasions of emotional experience throws open a dizzying array of speculative questions when it comes to nonhuman forms of life and sentience, questions that I will turn to in greater detail in the fifth section. In this section, however, I want to draw out some of the implications of Whitehead's philosophy for how we understand and make sense of human experience, with a particular emphasis on contemporary theorisations of affect in geography and the wider social sciences. Cultural geography has, over the past decade or so, played a significant role in shaping conceptually informed research on the affective dimensions of human experience and their mediation through the myriad forces of social and cultural life (Anderson, 2017; Dewsbury, 2009; Keating, 2019; McCormack, 2014; Tedeschi, 2021). There are, as Anderson (2017) notes, a range of different approaches to the theorisation of affect in human geography. While these approaches are sometimes conflicting in their ontological commitments, they are all broadly characterised by a shared desire to ‘attune to a range of intensities and atmospheres felt through bodies’ (Anderson, 2017: 1). Whitehead's philosophy, with its emphasis on the emotional basis of experience, provides an important and productive pathway for grappling with these affective, non-representational dimensions that subtend human perception in a more-than-human world.
Theoretical debates in geography about the nature and value of affect as a concept have tended to gravitate around the distinction between affect and emotion (McCormack, 2006; Thien, 2005; Tolia-Kelly, 2006). While acknowledging the significance of these disciplinary exchanges, it is perhaps worth noting that, when Whitehead speaks of the ‘emotional’ basis of experience, he is largely referring to affective intensities and not to recognisable emotions such as ‘happiness’, ‘hope’, ‘fear’, or ‘despair’. This is not to say that there is no overlap between the two: some affects rise to the level of conscious discernment and are culturally mediated in/through linguistic signification, but, from Whitehead's metaphysical perspective, this is the exception rather than the rule. The throbs of emotion that constitute Whitehead's occasions of experience operate in an immediate manner – which is to say, independently of language's mediating power. As Dewsbury (2009: 22) explains, focussing on the immediacy of affect …emphasizes that before we signify affective forces as emotional feelings such as love, hate, envy, shame, pride, etc., we acknowledge that the force itself delivers us to embrace or spurn that which we encounter in the world.
Even when focussing on human beings, Whitehead maintains that consciously discriminated perception represents only a small proportion of what is experienced. In what is perhaps one of his most beautifully worded passages, Whitehead (1978: 267) explains that: Consciousness flickers; and even at its brightest, there is a small focal region of clear illumination, and a large penumbral region of experience which tells of intense experience in dim apprehension. The simplicity of consciousness is no measure of the complexity of concrete experience.
For Whitehead, as Mills (2003: 210) suggests, ‘everything that exists is comprised of active units of experiential complexity, from the robust psychological processes of human cognition, to the elementary particles inherent in a stone’. The implication here is that what we tend to parse as human experience is from the outset an in-folding and amplification of experiences that can only be described as nonhuman. One might say, paraphrasing Mills’ imagery, that within the loftiest forms of consciousness, there are pulses of emotion – that is, affects – that are also capable of participating in the non-conscious experience of physical matter. Experience is no longer the attribute that distinguishes human (subject) from nature (object), rather, it is an immanent conduit for the transmission of affects that are always already nonhuman. It is in this sense that Whitehead's ontological account of emotion serves to deepen contemporary discussions concerning the post-humanist implications of affect in human geography (Asker and Andrews, 2020; Boyd, 2022; Roberts, 2012; Williams et al., 2019), because it radically challenges those frameworks of alterity that position the nonhuman as something radically ‘other’ than the human. When affect is understood in this way as the nonhuman intensity immanent to any socially recognisable emotion, the notion of an incommensurable divide between human and nonhuman gives way to an ontology characterised instead by radical complicity (see Coccia, 2019). From a Whiteheadian perspective, the question of the nonhuman should not necessarily lead us into the kinds of conceptual and ethical lacunae associated with the alterity of the other (Simpson, 2017). Rather, the act of posing this question in terms of affect demands a novel apprehension of that which remains nonhuman within the ‘large penumbral regions’ of human experience, chiming with existing geographical approaches that emphasise the ‘pre-individual’ nature of affect (Keating, 2019) and its significance as a tool for re-thinking subjectivity beyond the human (Williams and Burdon, 2023).
The penumbral regions of experience that so interested Whitehead have largely been overlooked by major figures in the Western philosophical tradition, including Descartes, Hume, and Kant, who each based their theories of human experience on the clear and distinct information associated with sense perception (particularly visual perception). Yet, as we have already noted, this focal region of clear illumination is just a small part of what is perceived in human experience. Whitehead (1978: 121) refers to this over-emphasised dimension of experience as ‘perception in the mode of presentational immediacy’. Based purely on extension, this mode of perception ‘gives no information as to the past or the future. It merely presents an illustrated portion of the present duration’ (1978: 168). For Whitehead, however, there is always another, more primitive mode of perception at play in human experience, namely ‘perception in the mode of causal efficacy’ (1978: 176). In contrast to presentational immediacy, perception in the mode of causal efficacy refers to the penumbral regions of experience populated by nonhuman affects: it is a vague and non-sensuous perception of causal relations operating upon, through, and beyond us in ways that, while unseen, are nonetheless viscerally felt. Moreover, being the more primitive form of experience, perception in the mode of causal efficacy is what we share with the nonhuman world, emerging from those pulses of emotion that Whitehead attributes to all actually existing occasions.
But what does perception in the mode of causal efficacy look like in practice? Whitehead (1978: 176) explains the non-sensuous nature of this more primitive mode of perception in the following way: An inhibition of familiar sensa is very apt to leave us a prey to vague terrors respecting a circumambient world of causal operations. In the dark there are vague presences, doubtfully feared; in the silence, the irresistible causal efficacy of nature presses itself upon us; in the vagueness of the low hum of insects in an August woodland, the inflow into ourselves of feelings from enveloping nature overwhelm us; in the dim consciousness of half-sleep, the presentations of sense fade away, and we are left with the vague feeling of influences from vague things around us.
A key implication of Whitehead's analysis of experience into these two modes of perception and their interplay is, as I have suggested, the primitive nature of perception in the mode of causal efficacy and thus the ontological primacy of affect in relation to sense perception. For Whitehead, then, the vivid display that human beings and other so-called ‘higher’ organisms experience through the presentational immediacy of sense perception is ontologically dependent upon the vague, emotional complexity of affect. The clear and distinct experience provided by sense perception should, in other words, be contextualised as a relatively recent product of biological evolution and thus should not serve as the basis for our conceptualisations of a world that extends far beyond human experience. Indeed, what sense perception provides us an experience of is not so much a world of objects existing independently of the organism but rather a re-interpretation of the non-sensuous forms of affective experience that issue forth from the body's in-folding of causally efficacious processes. Thus, the objects that we perceive so vividly through sight are points-of-view on affects that themselves remain imperceptible to the eye. What we perceive, in other words, is conditioned by the corporeal push and pull of affects that form the ontological basis of any actually existing entity, whether human or otherwise.
Life
In its valorisation of affect as a form of non-sensuous perception immanent to all that exists, Whitehead's speculative philosophy also issues forth a radical reversal of the relationship between life and experience as it is traditionally understood according to the conventions of modern thought. Biological organisms, with their complex nervous systems and specialised sensory organs, can no longer be thought of as the necessary condition for experience: on the contrary, experience precedes and exceeds not only conscious perception but also, as the preceding discussion of affect shows, the emergence of living beings and the very distinction between the biological and the inorganic – or, as Whitehead puts it, between life and nature (1938: 204). Pulses of experience are the basic constituents of all that exists, regardless of whether they are consciously perceived by a living organism. As Whitehead (1929: 3) notes, ‘at the lower end of the scale, it is hazardous to draw any sharp distinction between living things and inorganic matter’. In this third section, then, I want to reflect on the place of life as both an idea and an ethos in Whitehead's ontological account of experience and to unpack its significance for re-thinking the broader stakes of vitalist thought in contemporary more-than-human scholarship.
Before returning to Whitehead in more detail, however, it is worth noting that vitalism as a philosophical movement has undergone significant changes over the past century. Perhaps the most dramatic of these changes, Greco (2021) argues, relates to the way vitalists traditionally conceptualised life in its relationship to matter. According to its classical definition, vitalism ‘expresses a concern with explaining the specificity of biological life’ (Greco, 2021: 48, emphasis my own) such that the vitality of living organisms is affirmed as something fundamentally irreducible to the mechanics of non-living materials. This classical definition of vitalism has been radically transformed in recent years, particularly through disciplines such as cultural geography, where researchers working at the intersection of new materialism, non-representational theory, and science and technology studies have sought to extend vitalism's sensitivity towards the liveliness or vital ‘push’ of worldly encounters beyond the biological domain (Greenhough, 2010). Heavily influenced by the work of Gilles Deleuze and his own typically idiosyncratic reading of Spinozan and Bergsonian vitalism, this radically expanded form of ‘neo-vitalism’ (Gandy and Jasper, 2017) has played a significant role in animating geographical debates concerning the more-than-human over the past two decades (see Braun, 2008; Greenhough, 2010; Kearnes, 2006; Klinke, 2019; Royle, 2017; Roberts and Dewsbury, 2021).
Whitehead's speculative philosophy provides an important contribution to these debates, not least because his non-anthropocentric account of experience implies a kind of vitalistic diffusion of life throughout the universe. And yet, the question of what Whitehead understands ‘life’ to be is not an easy one to answer – and it is this, I argue, that makes his thought an intervention rather than a straightforward contribution to existing debates within more-than-human scholarship. One reason for this difficulty is the cosmological perspective required of his metaphysical approach. As I have shown throughout this article, Whitehead commits himself to the idea that, given the actual existence of living organisms, the fundamental building blocks of reality must exhibit some ‘lifelike’ properties in themselves, however, subtle or fleeting these might be. Here, again, Whitehead's speculative wager that reality consists of pulses of experience represents a philosophically innovative attempt at sidestepping longstanding debates concerning the emergence of life from non-living matter. The actual existence of living beings in the form of biological organisms is not a particularly confounding or even interesting problem from the perspective of speculative philosophy. What the problem of life entails, for Whitehead, is in fact an invitation to revise our familiar metaphysical frameworks and assumptions through a process of rigorous philosophical speculation, such that we might better understand what the fundamental nature of reality must be like for something like organic life to be possible (Basile, 2017: 3).
In what sense, then, are the pulses of experience that Whitehead labels actual occasions ‘alive’? An answer to this question can be found in Modes of Thought – specifically, the chapter entitled ‘Nature Alive’ – where Whitehead defines life as ‘enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future’ (1938: 229). Crucially, this ‘enjoyment’ speaks to what an actual occasion is rather than what it does: it is what marks out or defines each pulse of experience as something resolutely singular, different, and, in its own way, entirely novel (Shaviro, 2010). Whitehead (1938: 206) is very clear on this issue, stating: ‘I have termed each individual act of immediate self-enjoyment an “occasion of experience”’. What is also clear, however, is that this act of enjoyment is not reducible to anthropomorphic frameworks. To equate each occasion of experience with an act of immediate self-enjoyment is Whitehead's way of saying that the building blocks of reality are fundamentally processual: each emerging pulse of experience relationally takes into account or ‘prehends’ the emotional tone embodied in its past, but, as a condition of its becoming actual, it prehends this past in its own singularly creative way, thus adding something new to the world in the process.
While a full account of Whitehead's theory of prehension lies beyond the scope of this article, what I want to emphasise here is the sense in which, for Whitehead, life is immanent to the actual occasions – those drops of affective experience – that form the fundamental building blocks of his metaphysical landscape. Life, in this metaphysical sense, refers to the element of novelty embedded in the actuality of the present, understood as the becoming of an occasion: life is ‘the name for originality, and not for tradition’ (Whitehead, 1978: 104). Here, Whitehead's speculative philosophy provides a means of zooming in on what he understood to be a defining feature of human experience, namely, that we never truly experience the same thing twice – at least, not in the same way. To experience anything at all is to participate in the production of something new through the registration of some kind of difference, however, subtle or imperceptible this difference might be. Even in situations of stagnation where it appears that nothing new is taking place, there are, Whitehead would argue, pulses of experience that enable this sense of nothing-happening to be felt as occasions endowed with their own singular actuality, their own differential force. Similarly, when we look carefully at the texture of our experience, we quickly see that there is no relationship of negation at play in the processual movement between the becoming of occasions. Experiences never oppose one another, nor do they cancel each other out: the most we can say about an experience, from a Whiteheadian perspective, is that, when it happens, it will be different from anything that came before.
There is, for this reason, a kind of ‘affirmatory vitalism’ at play in Whitehead's assertion that the occasions of experience that constitute the processual building blocks of reality are characterised by an immediacy of self-enjoyment. The ‘vitality’ in question here refers to an incessant becoming of experience that is forever adding to the past and complicating the future for all beings, whether human or otherwise, through a process that is ‘affirmatory’ to the extent that it functions solely through the differential production of novelty. The term affirmation has fallen out of favour amongst cultural geographers in recent years, and much ink continues to be spilled on the vexed question of whether an affirmatory concept of life as a differentially productive force risks sidelining the more troubling or ‘negative’ dimensions of existence, such as loss, absence, and decay (see Bissell et al., 2021). In a recent paper, Dekeyser and Jellis (2021) coin the term ‘affirmationism’ to diagnose what they see is a tendency within (neo-)vitalist geographies ‘to engage those forces that incite or sustain existence while failing to consider those moments when existence comes apart or breaks down’. The kind of affirmatory vitalism that I am attributing to Whithead's ontology of experience does not entail ignorance of these moments where things break down or where we find ourselves broken by life's events, but rather provides a means of understanding their obdurate reality as moments or occasions of experience endowed with both phenomenological and ontological significance.
Moreover, I think Whitehead would be puzzled by current geographical critiques of affirmationism and their implicit appeal to ‘non-existence’ as an explanatory category. For the ‘non-existent’ to be entertained as an intellectual concept, it must first be experienced in the manner of a pulse of emotion originating in and further implicating other actually existing occasions. What is at stake in Whitehead's thought is not simply a naïve celebration of life as a productive force, therefore, but rather an acknowledgement that even phenomenological experiences of loss or absence – indeed, of processes of decay, dissolution, and death – have a certain more-than-human vitality to them in the sense that they are felt as occasions of experience in their own right. For Whitehead, even absence affirms itself ontologically in the manner of an occasion of experience that, through its becoming, folds a new perspective into the texture of the real.
For Whitehead, then, this restless differential productivity of experience inscribes a certain degree of vitality throughout the universe. Thinking of experience in ontological terms, as Whitehead does, implies that the incessant newness that characterises human experience is also written into the metaphysical building blocks that make up reality. In Whitehead's (1929: 17) own words, ‘the root principles of life are, in some lowly form, exemplified in all physical existence’. All entities, whether living or otherwise, are vectors of experience that each add a novel perspective to the world. A stone that has been worn smooth by water is, in its very materiality, a singular experience of the processes through which it has been formed. Its density, its smoothness, its physical allure: these characteristics that we ordinarily think of as material properties attributed to an underlying substance are, from a Whiteheadian perspective, an expression of the unique experiences of geologic pressures and hydrological weathering that make that particular stone what it is. The stone's materiality simply is its ongoing experience of its past. And when this stone is picked up and rolled around in the palm of a human hand, it is the vital difference of this nonhuman experience, this lithic rumination on the forces of water, pressure, and time, that makes itself felt.
In the words of Victor Lowe (1962: 28), Whitehead's ontology of experience teaches us ‘that there is nothing in the universe that is completely dead, mere material, with which we may do as our whims dictate’. This is not to say, however, that there is no significant difference between living organisms and inorganic matter. Whitehead's universe is alive to the extent that it is composed of experiences that singularly differentiate themselves as they come into being, but, as Greco (2021: 57) points out, this life, ‘while relevant to nature as a whole, is not equally distributed across nature’. Thus, while the basic constituents of the universe are indeed alive, only in the case of biological organisms does the vital dimension of creative novelty, inherent in each occasion's self-enjoyment, come to occupy a dominant role: in Whitehead's (1933: 266) words, living organisms are organisations of experience in which ‘a co-ordination has been achieved that raises into prominence some functionings inherent in the ultimate occasions’. To put this in simpler terms, living organisms are characterised by forms of organisation that coordinate and thus amplify the dimension of originality – or what I have been calling the ‘vitality’ or ‘life’ – inherent within each occasion of experience.
It is at this point that Whitehead's account of the vitality of experience once more intervenes in – and perhaps even parts ways with – contemporary (neo-)vitalism in cultural geography, which, as Klinke (2019: 2) observes, often emphasises ‘the impossibility of separating life and earth, organic and inorganic matter’. Whitehead acknowledged the rarity of living things in a universe which, although suffused with the forces generative of life, remained largely dominated by modes of organisation in which the vital sparks of novelty immanent to each drop of experience ‘average out so as to produce negligible effect’ (1933: 266). Indeed, the difference in degree that makes it unwise to draw hard distinctions between living beings and inorganic matter at an ontological level remains, for Whitehead, a difference that matters, to the extent that ‘the superiority of a living over an inanimate nexus of occasions is that it does not refuse so much of the novelty in its environment’ (Lowe, 1962: 51). It matters, then, that living organisms have a capacity to amplify the differential force of experience – that is to say, to live this force – inherent within all things, to varying degrees of intensity. The subtlety of Whitehead's vitalism – if we can even describe his philosophy with this term – is that it provides a means of refracting our metaphysical assumptions about reality through those dimensions of experience which, despite being empirically rare, are most alive with originality and a sensitivity towards difference. This affirmative gesture that seeks to understand the whole through the vitality of a singular occurrence is, I would suggest, precisely what a philosophically rigorous critique of anthropocentric thinking demands, and thus represents Whitehead's most significant intervention into more-than-human geographies today.
Conclusion
Whitehead died in 1947, 10 years after he retired from teaching at Harvard. The world has changed dramatically since this time, and yet, as this article has attempted to show, contemporary critiques of anthropocentric thought in the humanities and social sciences have much to gain from a renewed engagement with Whitehead's ideas. This is notably so in the field of human geography, I have argued, where a swathe of conceptually innovative debates regarding the more-than-human dimensions of social and cultural life have created a fertile environment for re-thinking many of the fundamental metaphysical assumptions and ontological starting-points associated with ‘Modern’ social science. Focussing on his radically ontological re-thinking of experience, this article has explored the significance of Whitehead's thought in relation to geography's existing theorisations of matter, affect, and life as key conceptual placeholders in the domain of more-than-human thinking. Thus, by challenging the assumption of an ontological distinction between matter and experience, Whitehead's philosophy offers exciting opportunities for re-imagining materiality, perception, and vitality in ways that not only go beyond the human, but that also take us beyond the living.
In what remains of this article, I want to conclude by focussing in on three key dimensions of Whitehead's theory of experience, underlining their significance for contemporary more-than-human geographies. The first aspect that I want to emphasise here is the sense in which Whitehead's ontological concept of experience radically precedes the demarcations of subjective interiority traditionally associated with phenomenology and other forms of post-Kantian thought. While Whitehead does not deny the significance of this sense of interiority in our everyday lives, his speculative metaphysics does pave the way for an understanding of experience that is fundamentally common to both biological and physical entities – albeit manifesting in radically different forms. This is a concept of experience that emphasises the fundamentally affective basis of reality (Shaviro, 2009), where affect stands for the abstraction of emotion from the limited purview of human meaning-making and its relative autonomy vis-à-vis the individuated interiority of the self. For this reason, Whitehead's philosophy provides an important touchstone for post-phenomenological geographers seeking to explore the relationship between affect and the non- or more-than-human today (Ash, 2019; Ash and Simpson, 2016; Kinkaid, 2021).
The second aspect that I wish to emphasise is that, for Whitehead, experience rarely rises to the level of conscious perception. As noted in the preceding paragraph, this implies an extension of experience to the nonhuman and even non-living world. But it also implies a problematisation of the domain of the empirical in such a way that our own ‘human’ experience is revealed to contain various nonhuman perspectives inscribed immanently within it. These perspectives are characterised by what Whitehead (1978: 276) refers to as non-sensuous perception, they are modes of feeling characterised by ‘intense experience in dim apprehension’. One of the more surprising aspects of Whitehead's philosophy stems from the idea that our own experience is much less human – that is, less clear and distinct – than we ordinarily assume. As Bertrand Russell (1956: 39) recalled, Whitehead once used the following example to make this point: ‘You think the world is what it looks like in fine weather at noon day; I think it is what it seems like in the early morning when one first wakes from deep sleep’. So, while we are accustomed to the idea that experience is what makes us human, Whitehead's philosophy encourages us to take seriously the idea that ‘our’ experience already includes the much vaguer intensities of animal, vegetal, and mineral experience vibrating within its nooks and crannies.
Finally, Whitehead's speculative philosophy paints a picture of experience as a fundamentally creative – and, as I have argued, thoroughly vital – process. The present moment makes itself felt as a thoroughly singular experience of its past, breaking with the deterministic causality associated with traditional forms of ‘scientific materialism’. For vast swathes of the physical universe, however, this determinist causality holds sway because the tinge of novelty in each experience is averaged out rather than amplified. It is with this in mind that I situate Whitehead as a thoroughly vitalistic thinker, not because he naively ascribes agency or vitality to all actually existing entities. Rather, engaging with Whitehead's philosophy offers more-than-human geographers a kind of vitalistic ethos, which is less about demarcating the empirical relationship between the living and the non-living, and more a provocation to understand the qualitative richness of human experience as an expression of ontological processes that both precede and exceed the human. Reconfiguring experience in ontological rather than phenomenological terms is, for this reason, much more than a mere intellectual exercise, for it provides a means of conceiving nature where, in Greco's (2021: 58) terms, ‘the qualitative vividness of experience – including human experience, in all its positive and negative vicissitudes – appears intrinsic to it, arising out of its most basic elements, rather than sequestered away from the world into the mind of a subject’.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
