Process-feminist ontology is the only method for altering worldviews and deconstructing current market frameworks

“PROCESS” ONTOLOGY Alfred North Whitehead, a noted mathematician and philosopher who wrote mainly in the 1920s and 1930s, also clearly broke from standard philosophy at the point of Humean ontology and epistemology. Whitehead’s ontology is intrinsically open and ethically rich, and I believe has important resonances with the sort of contemporary feminist thought reviewed above. I point to his work not because I think feminists need to take intellectual orders from some “dead white male,” but rather because his formulation of a vital, interconnected, and purposeful universe includes a careful discussion of the questions of ontology and realism that can be directly compared and contrasted to the critical-realist alternative. Whitehead’s challenge to Hume at the level of ontology is profound. Whitehead sees in most modern (and many premodern) philosophers and scientists allegiance to a substance-and-attribute ontology. In a substance-and-attribute ontology, “stuff” or “bits of matter” are the fundamental ontological units (1966, 1929: 128–9; 1968, 1938: 128). These substances are thought of as fundamentally separate and distinct – as chairs, for example, or as persons, each distinguishable from the other – and considered to endure through time, though with changes to their attributes (location, for example, or color). More to the point, whenever the question of knowledge is posed as being about how our minds (in here) can know about other substances (out there), one can see that such a notion of reality has already been assumed. Such a framing of the question assumes that the “stuff” of a knower is distinct from that of the known. Hume worked within the background of substance-and-attribute ontology but rejected substances, leaving only the attributes to be knowable. Whitehead’s ontology, in contrast, is fundamentally process-oriented, energetic, and interconnected. He referred to it as the “philosophy of organism,” though later commentators tend to use the term “process thought.” Whitehead’s fundamental unit of reality, the “actual entity” (1966, 1929: 205), is a “[drop] of experience, complex and interdependent” (1966, 1929: 7), or a “throb of experience” (p. 8). The actual entity is “a process, and is not describable in terms of the morphology of a ‘stuff’” (p. 8). In this ontology, reality is a deeply interconnected whole; each entity “feels” all other pre-existing actual entities (although some more vaguely than others) in what Whitehead terms “prehension” and then synthesizes these data into “the unity of an emotional pattern expressive of its own subjectivity” (p. 8). In the present moment, the entity is actualized through its own subjective experience and then becomes the objective data for the entities of the next moment, in an ongoing process. A person, for example, in this view does not first exist and then have experiences and relationships, as would be the case in a substance-and-attribute ontology. In the organicist view, rather, a person is constituted in and by experience and relationships, as sequences of prehensions and syntheses. For Whitehead, these processes are not merely confined to conscious selves, but rather describe reality from the simplest electron to the most complex living creature. By emphasizing experience, including human bodily experience, as the fundamental unifying reality, he removes the mind-vs.-matter conundrum.3 Conscious experience is not to be seen as something apart from matter, but rather is an outgrowth, at a very high level of complexity, of a reality of experience that goes all the way down. Chairs, or elbows, like persons, also “become” in the moment. The emphasis on energy and interconnection, rather than matter and mechanics, in Whitehead’s ontological scheme is, as he himself points out, consistent with developments in post-Newtonian physics. Many later interpreters have noted the coherency of Whitehead’s view with more recent developments in complexity theory and self-organization. What, then, of epistemology? Whitehead, unlike the contemporary critical realists, “accepts Hume’s doctrine that nothing is to be received into the philosophical scheme which is not discoverable as an element in subjective experience” (1966, 1929: 137). There is a radical difference, however, from both critical realism and Hume, in Whitehead’s notion of what “experience” entails. For him, experience involves perception in two modes, only one of which he sees recognized in Hume’s thought. Whitehead calls one of these modes of perception “presentational immediacy.” By this he means the mode in which the percepta “are distinct, definite, controllable, apt to immediate enjoyment, and with the minimum of reference to the past, or to the future” (Whitehead 1966, 1929: 188). His claim, then, that for Hume, “presentational immediacy was the primary fact of perception, and any apprehension of causation was, somehow or other, to be elicited from this primary fact” (1966, 1929: 121), bears a certain similarity to the discussions of causation that the contemporary critical realists put forward. Both Whitehead and the critical realists are concerned with how causality can enter the picture, if all we know are atomistic events along with observations of, in critical-realist rhetoric, their “constant event patterns” (Lawson 1997: 19) or, in Whitehead’s phrase, the “repetition of associated presentational experiences” (Whitehead 1966, 1929: 122). What Hume neglected, however, according to Whitehead, was perception in the mode of “causal efficacy.” Percepta in this mode are . . . vague, not to be controlled, heavy with emotion; it produces the sense of derivation from an immediate past, and of passage to an immediate future; a sense of emotional feeling, belonging to oneself in the past, passing into oneself in the present, and passing from oneself in the present towards oneself in the future; a sense of influx of influence. . . . This is our general sense of existence, as one item among others, in an efficacious actual world. (1966, 1929: 118) For example, suppose one examines a five-pronged object. To note the distinct aspects of color, size, shape, and weight is to perceive the object in the mode of presentational immediacy. To perceive the object as one’s own hand, and sense that it is something that one can, in fact, purposively direct to pick up a pen, is to perceive in the mode of causal efficacy. To see a person in terms of figure, smell, and sound uses the mode favored by Hume; to recognize in that person a being like oneself, a companion, uses the mode Hume omitted.4 Whitehead calls his position provisional realism (1997, 1925: 91). That is, because of the integral presence of actual entities in other entities, we perceive (via the mode of causal efficacy) that “other things . . . are in the world of actualities in the same sense as we are” (1966, 1929: 136). To put it in other words, while we can admit to knowledge only what we know from experience (as an empiricist would posit), because reality interpenetrates and because our experience includes broad, vague feelings of influence and efficaciousness, we are confident that items and relations outside us exist (as a realist would posit). We can easily compare Whitehead’s version of realism to that of the critical realists. Lawson, for example, defines his preferred position as asserting “that the ultimate objects of enquiry exist for the most part independently of, or at least prior to, their investigation” (1999: 27). Both versions of realism refute the fully subjectivist or solipsistic claim that the world exists only as “in our minds” or upon interaction with our minds (as any realism would). But Lawson’s language of “objects” and “independently” seems insufficiently distinguished from the usual dualisms of subject and object and gaps between the knower and known that are inherent in a substance-and-attribute ontology. The “transcendental” realism aspect of critical-realist thought seeks to assert the existence of objects (mechanisms) outside of experience, through (since the gap between knower and known cannot be directly bridged) arguments for their logical necessity. Abstraction and reason are called on to bridge the assumed chasm. Whitehead’s ontology, by contrast, more thoroughly locates the knower within reality, and (through a broader, deeper, and more serious understanding of experience) sees the knower as having a sense of the whole and the many (or, in more current lingo, the “other”), as well as of the self (1968, 1938: 117). Whitehead’s ontology, further, puts emancipatory and caring activities at the core of reality. Elaborating on his idea of “feeling,” he suggests that “[a]t the basis of our existence is the sense of ‘worth’” (1968, 1938: 109). Moral and purposive behavior arises from the fact that “[e]xistence . . . is the upholding of value intensity. Also no unit can separate itself from the others, and from the whole. And yet each unit exists in its own right. It upholds value intensity for itself, and this involves sharing value intensity with the universe” (1968, 1938: 111). Whitehead rejects the notion of matter as passive substance, proceeding either deterministically or randomly without purpose. A sense of aim and direction is integral to his ontology. Similarly to the critical realists, Whitehead finds that “Hume fails to provide experience with any objective content” (1966, 1929: 137) and seeks to fill that void. Unlike the critical realists, Whitehead proposes an ontology, which, by acknowledging noncognitive and nonsensory perceptions, coherently grounds a (provisionally) realist philosophy. PROCESS AND FEMINISM But note what cognitive and philosophical biases must be overcome if one is to become open to considering Whitehead’s organicist philosophy. Feelings! Emotions! Influence! Connection! Holism! Vagueness! Process! Value! Is there any rule of polite philosophical and scientific discourse that Whitehead does not break? The notions that Whitehead seeks to introduce are exactly those that feminist scholarship suggests will be most feared and suppressed. The dualistic structures and notion of solitary, separative selfhood criticized by feminists are the same structures and notion addressed by Whitehead: All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. The result always does violence to that immediate experience which we express in our actions, our hopes, our sympathies, our purposes, and which we enjoy in spite of our lack of phrases for its verbal analysis. We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances, each enjoying an illusory experience. . . . (1966, 1929: 136) A feminist-process view can ground a (provisionally) realist philosophy and even more importantly, can ground emancipatory projects. But, as contemporary feminist scholarship points out, this view of reality faces an uphill battle against social, historical, economic, religious, and psychosexual tendencies maintained precisely in order to suppress those parts of reality that are “not to be controlled.” Other scholars, from feminist, multiculturalist, or ecological perspectives, have also drawn on insights about “feeling” and even directly on Whitehead. Rajani Kanth, for example, uses emotional language in criticizing the Eurocentric nature of critical realism to date, concluding that we need ideas that are not so much “bright, perhaps, I think, so much as warm . . .” (1999: 200, emphasis in original). Charlene Spretnak’s The Resurgence of the Real (1999) provides a wide-ranging and nontechnical introduction to a process-oriented approach to realism, which builds on the feminist, ecological, spiritual, and political concerns emerging at the turn of the twentyfirst century. The use of the term “separative self” to describe homo economicus (Paula England 1993) is taken from the work of feminist theologian Catherine Keller (1986), who in turn draws on Whiteheadean thought.5 CONCLUSION This essay has used philosophical sources to examine how process, openness, purpose, feeling, and value might be intrinsically incorporated into the core of our views of how the world works. For some aspects of economics, the implications of such a changed worldview are fairly direct. The notion of “caring work” is problematic within the neoclassical framework, for example, because neoclassical theory has no room for concepts of intimacy, interdependence, and nurturance. Economic improvement is disastrously tied to notions of Pareto optimality or GDP growth in standard economics because there is no concept of value beyond that given by atomistic, individual utility. A process-feminist view lays the beginnings for taking on such sterility at the root. The fact that this ontological view also provides a way around old epistemological debates will, for many feminist economists, be an aspect of lesser importance. As a matter of everyday strategy, a feminist economist will still often find that phrasing her or his arguments largely within usual mainstream modes of discourse is, as Harding argued in Feminist Economics, the best way to achieve feminist ends. But, for a practicing feminist economist, might it not be more satisfactory, whether engaging in research or advocacy, to proceed with a sense that the universe is such that what one struggles for matters?