Rationalist Empiricism. Nathan Brown
actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection.51
The individual originates from and embodies the external totality. It “has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality.” Consciousness is a recently evolved element by which the selective character of the individual pursues its own purposes, thus deepening its individual being but obscuring the totality from which it emerges and in which it inheres. Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of this excess of subjectivity. The critical dimension of speculative thought is this self-correction, the delimitation of that selective emphasis by which consciousness obscures external totality. The totality is here preserved as external, even though we embody and originate from it. Yet it can be recovered by philosophy, through the self-correction of the excessive subjectivity of consciousness. And we can say that while empiricism engages the experience of the “sheer actuality” through which we are embedded in the external totality, rationalism delimits the selective emphasis by which our consciousness is constrained. Thus both are required, countering and amplifying one another, in order for philosophy to pursue its speculative labor in concert with critique. We should note as well that in his speculative thinking of the “totality,” Whitehead decompletes its conceptualization as the whole, noting that “the community of actual things … is an incompletion in process of production.”52 In recovering the totality obscured by the selection, one may recover its incompletion as well, deconstituting the totality as not-all by going beyond the subjective limit that would leave the very question of the whole indeterminate.
Self-correction of subjectivity; empirical embeddedness in actuality; rational overcoming of selective consciousness; recovery of totality; decompletion of the whole: Whitehead formulates the essential elements of speculative critique that will be pursued in what follows. I hope to show that the materialism of critique, within and through speculation, depends upon a mutual interruption of reason and experience across a gap that is never resolved into a synthesis or covered by a ground. The perpetual experience of this interruption, and the constantly renewed thinking of its consequences, is the practice of rationalist empiricism.
PART I
Rationalist Empiricism
Very well then; just this once let us give [the mind] a completely free rein, so that after a while, when it is time to tighten the reins, it may more readily submit to being curbed.
—René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy
Tho’ the instance is so particular and singular, that ’tis scarcely worth our observing, and does not merit that for it alone we should alter our general maxim.
—David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature
1
ABSENT BLUE WAX: ON THE MINGLING OF METHODOLOGICAL EXCEPTIONS
If philosophy involves the creation of concepts, it is the systematic character of philosophical thought that enables it to function as such. The statement and defense of a philosophical “position” through argumentation does not amount to the articulation of a philosophy, because every philosophy must construct not only arguments but the very concepts through which those arguments may be understood. Such construction requires a systematic determination of concepts, wherein the meaning and the functions any concept acquires relies upon and supports the meaning and functions of the other concepts that, together, constitute the singular thought of a philosopher. The positions of philosophers like Descartes, or Hume, or Spinoza, or Kant, or Hegel are not thereby incommensurable with one another, but their commensurability must itself be constructed through an understanding of each one’s thought which grasps the systematicity of its determinations, thus relating concepts to one another (for example, “idea”) through the specificity they acquire in each system, rather than through the assumption of a common terrain of positions they commonly inhabit. Philosophical systems must be made to communicate not so much at the interface of the common words they deploy, but through a paradoxical subsumption of our own thinking into the interior of their conceptual relationships, from within which we must think toward the interiority of another system that we must also inhabit. Philosophical communication suggests a strange topology wherein the exteriority of thought—the possibility that we may think one philosopher with another—is encountered within the deepest recesses of systems that would seem to shelter the specificity of their concepts from one another, that would seem to require us to remain within the immanent regulation of their terms in order to think those terms at all.
Alfred North Whitehead defines speculative philosophy as “the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted.” Here “coherence,” he stipulates, “means that the fundamental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed, presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaningless.” Thus, “it is the ideal of speculative philosophy that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of abstraction from one another.”1 This ideal involves the invention of concepts in the manner just discussed. It does not mean that they will be definable in terms of one another; “it means that what is indefinable in one such notion cannot be abstracted from its relevance to the other notions.” It is the indetermination haunting all individual words that finds its support, in the case of philosophical concepts, through the inter-determination of concepts that can never be wholly “defined” because they must be thought in their relational coherence. The term “applicable,” in Whitehead’s definition of speculative philosophy, “means that some items of experience are thus interpretable” (through the speculative scheme) while “adequate” means that “there are not items incapable of such interpretation.” So the speculative scope of philosophy is potentially applicable to all items of experience. Whitehead thus makes the important comment that his ideal of speculative philosophy “has its rational side and its empirical side”:
The rational side is expressed by the terms “coherent” and “logical.” The empirical side is expressed by the terms “applicable” and “adequate.” But the two sides are bound together by clearing away an ambiguity which remains in the previous explanation of the term ‘adequate.’ The adequacy of the scheme over every item does not mean adequacy over such items as happen to have been considered. It means that the texture of observed experience, as illustrating the philosophic scheme, is such that all related experience must exhibit the same texture.2
Thus not only the rational coherence of a scheme of concepts or “fundamental ideas” is at issue in philosophical systematicity; the very interpretation of our experience is bound up, insofar as we enter into the thinking of a philosophical system, with the intra-systemic determination of its concepts. The comparison of philosophical systems is in this sense not only an intellectual historical or analytical task; it is also a lived practice. We think and interpret the world that we inhabit through the ideas we have at our disposal, and insofar as these are philosophical they are systematically articulated. Thus our experience of the world enters into philosophical systematicity, and when we think across systems we also attempt to carry out the improbable (impossible?) task of carrying our experience from one system into another. What is the world that we pass through, at the crux of concept and experience, when we do so? Where is the extra-systemic space of philosophical reflection, or of thought, in which we think the compossibility or communication of philosophical systems? Where, and what, is the world we recompose as we do so?
Let me step away from what seem to me the vertiginous difficulties of these questions in order to approach the absence of their terrain from another angle, through another question, closely related: What is a philosophical exception? Or better, how are we to think the mutual exteriority of philosophical exceptions? Or at least, what happens when we encounter philosophical exceptions in their mutual exteriority, and when we invite them to encounter one another? Those are the kinds of questions I want to pursue in what follows. For an exception, in philosophy, would be an exception to systematicity: it would