1. Alfred N. Whitehead, Modes of Thought (New York: The Free Press, 1968), p. 41.

The account of the sixth day should be written, He gave them speech and they

became souls.

Alfred North Whitehead1

This sentence, concluding the chapter “Expression” in White-head’s Modes of Thought, is typical of the kind which made him whathas been characterized as one of the most often quoted, and theleast often read, among twentieth-century philosophers. If youquote such a sentence, it may give your text a poetic touch, as if abreath of fresh air entered the closed room of your argumentation.Somebody else is authorizing you to make present, in a suggestivenutshell, what you never would dare write, or even think, in yourown name. But usually, you would not be able to defend the quote:you just felt the need to transmit it, to transmit the refreshing effectit produced on you when you read it, most of the time as alreadyquoted by somebody else. If asked, maybe you would protect your-self behind the protest that it is only a beautiful metaphor for yourown serious, responsible ideas.

My point here will be that there is never ever any metaphor insuch Whiteheadian sentences, and that the poetic touch, the experi-ence of fresh air, owes nothing to free inspiration and everything tohard technical construction. The verbs “to give” and “to become,” aswell as the nouns “speech” and “souls,” may well produce the im-pression of immediate understanding, their particular articulation

35

Configurations, 2005, 13: 35–55 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University

Press and the Society for Literature and Science.

Whitehead’s Account of the

Sixth Day

Isabelle Stengers, Université Libre de Bruxelles

36 Configurations

then producing the poetic touch. But they are first of all technicalWhiteheadian terms, the very conceptual role of which entails theimaginative jump produced by their articulation. And, as with allWhiteheadian concepts, their meaning cannot be elucidated rightaway, just as an animal cannot be approached right away: in bothcases, you need some slowing down and learning what they demandand how they behave.

I will thus propose such an approach to Whitehead’s account ofthe sixth day. A rather involved approach, since each step will try toslow down the on rush of predictable interpretations. I will try tohave the reader feel what it takes to approach Whitehead, which isalso how he challenges our habits of thought.

There is a first point, however, which I wish to make utterly and di-rectly clear. Correcting the biblical account of the sixth day, White-head accepts that we humans, gifted with speech, may be thought ofas “creatures”; but the “He” who gave us speech is not to be identifiedwith God as the author, master, and creator, or even as the One whowould have been able to give us the capacity for speech as some-thing ready-made. In Modes of Thought, we deal with modes ofthought indeed, that is, for Whitehead, with the way important ex-periences have found historical expression: “History is the record ofthe expressions of feelings peculiar to humanity.”2 The peculiar feel-ing that is expressed by any account of the sixth day is our feeling ofourselves as creatures among creatures, but also as separated in somepeculiar way from our fellow creatures. God may or may not be in-volved, but the historical record delivers one word to characterize thispeculiarity, which Whitehead accepts: this is the word “soul.” We willthus have to understand the difference between the Whiteheadianand Christian souls: our souls were not given, we “became” souls.

Yet as soon as we free Whitehead’s sentence from ready-made reli-gious interpretations, we risk falling into another trap, today a muchmore powerful one. And here begins the hard work, against the readi-ness of many in the human sciences to endorse forgetting about a“substantial” soul, and to confirm instead that human subjectivityand culture can indeed be defined as conditioned by language.

Something very important has happened as a result of this substi-tution. To be created as well as to be given refers to a problem of ex-istence, while to be conditioned refers to a problem of explanation,that is, of knowledge. More precisely, it refers to an “objective”knowledge, deducing what exists, including our claims to “have asoul,” from conditions that will explain away those claims.

2. Ibid., p. 27.

The power of this trap is such that before addressing the singular-ity of Whitehead’s answer to the question of the sixth day, I need tocomment on what may appear as a rather strange, if usual today,conflation of knowledge and existence—knowledge deciding whatexists (here, the power of language) and what does not (our souls).In order to avoid the heavy generalities distinguishing epistemologyand ontology, I will instead address the distinction between “neces-sary conditions” and “necessary and sufficient” conditions.

I choose such an approach because it is a quite technical distinc-tion, devoid of any suggestive poetic touch, while for Whitehead, asa mathematician (as for any mathematician), it was nevertheless acrucial one, even a dramatic one. Indeed, the fate of a mathematicaldemonstration, its scope, its success or failure, depends on it. Math-ematics is a case where the very existence of a mathematical being aswell constructed depends on its definition in terms of necessary andsufficient conditions.

But this distinction was also a dramatic one for Christian theol-ogy, when the salvation of the Christian soul is concerned. Divinegrace, for most theologians before Augustine, was necessary, but notsufficient, for salvation: salvation would need man’s first move,which grace would amplify and stabilize—or, at least, it neededman’s own acceptance of the divine offer. For Augustine, however,acceptance is also produced by grace, which thus acquired the statusof a necessary and sufficient condition for salvation.

In a certain way, in both mathematics and Augustinian theology,we deal with becoming: becoming a mathematical being, or becom-ing able to escape damnation. But in both cases, becoming is con-flated with being gifted with a sufficient condition. Since becomingrelates to the question of “what is it to exist?” and sufficient condi-tion to “what is it we can define?” we may speak in both cases of arealized conflation of existence and knowledge.

Now, outside mathematical thought and theology, no conditionis ever sufficient: the power of any condition always implies otherconditions. This is why the claim that something explains someother thing usually entails the distinction between what is felt toneed explanation and what we feel allowed to take for granted. Thiswas dramatized by Leibniz, the thinker of the principle of sufficientreason, who wrote that the whole universe is expressed by the least,most insignificant, most self-explanatory of our actions as well as bythe fateful choice of Adam eating the fateful apple. The universe isthe only necessary and sufficient condition. For finite knowledgethere will always be a gap between what comes into existence andwhat we can define.

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 37

Leibniz’s solution sends the conflation of existence and knowledgeup to God’s infinity. But it gives no room to a positive distinction, in-stead verifying that as soon as we think in terms of “conditions,” weare led to think of the difference between “necessary” and “necessaryand sufficient” as a “gap,” as what remains when everything we couldexplain has been explained. Such a gap may be explained away as amatter of contingency, or as the result of the finite character of ourknowledge. But the same gap may also be dramatized as designatingwhat has the power to transcend conditioning or reduction, whatcan and should be purified from everything that can be explainedaway in terms of something else. You may think here about existen-tial freedom as defined against all social conditioning.

These conflicting interpretations provide the setting for the veryquestion that turned Whitehead into a speculative philosopher; theradical, proudly exhibited, incoherence that he saw as plaguingmodern thought. Such a conflict pervades all domains where somekind of “objective explanation”—be it neuronal, linguistic, cultural,political, or social, or economic—may parade as a “nearly sufficient”condition, arousing vigorous protests in the name of what would es-cape, or transcend, so-called objective explanations.

Here indeed we have to slow down, because we have to resist gen-eral ideas about scientific knowledge and what would eventuallytranscend it. The example of scientific experimental demonstrationcertainly played a role in the power claimed by objective explana-tion. However, experimental objectivity is not something you cangeneralize. It is not related to the satisfaction of a general right ofreason but to an event, “experimental success.” For an experiment tobe a success, an operation of disentanglement must be achieved, asdistinguished from a unilateral arbitrary methodological cut. Thispossibility of disentanglement from the entangled world we aregiven is the condition for a framing that will enact a distinction be-tween some so-called general conditions, which may be taken forgranted, and what will be the matter of experimental demonstra-tion, when it becomes possible to demonstrate how somethingchanges as a function of something else. In other words, only in thecase of experimental success is an entangled world, lacking a neces-sary and sufficient condition, actively disentangled and framed insuch a way that one of its aspects acquires the power to verify whatwill then be called an objective definition—that is, the definition ofthe specific closed, functionally articulated set of conditions that“objectively” explains what is observed.

If the specificity of modern thought consists in its having neces-sary conditions parading as nearly sufficient ones, there is absolutely

38 Configurations

no surprise in the way the event of experimental success was ex-plained away by general antagonistic interpretations. From the sci-entists’ point of view, the event that they depend upon may be for-gotten in favor of the explanation it made possible. From the criticalpoint of view, be it that of Kant or that of modern sociology of sci-ence, there is no event: be it transcendentally or socially condi-tioned, human understanding is the only true author of the objec-tive explanation, while reality remains mute.

But listen now to how Whitehead celebrates, in Science and theModern World, the growth of modern science, and the faith in the or-der of nature without which it would not have been possible:

There is no parting from your own shadow. To experience this faith is . . . to

know that detached details merely in order to be themselves demand that

they should find themselves in a system of things; to know that this system

includes the harmony of logical rationality and the harmony of aesthetic

achievement; to know that, while the harmony of logic lies upon the universe

as an iron necessity, the aesthetic harmony stands before it as a living ideal

moulding the general flux in its broken progress towards finer, subtler issues.3

Here is what I would call a Whiteheadian dramatization of theevent of experimental success. Such a success indeed exhibits theiron logical necessity ruling a well-framed system of things—but italso means an aesthetic achievement, since, in order to become pos-sible, the successful framing of a “detail” requires the living ideal ofthe working scientist. Whitehead’s dramatization thus asks thosewho have faith in the power either of knowledge to discover the or-der of nature, or of human ideals to obtain their satisfaction, not topart from their own shadow—that is, not to part from what eachfaith requires in order to be fulfilled, and cannot provide by itself. Assoon as we take into account the passionate knower—for whomwhat matters is the aesthetic achievement of having detached detailsbecome themselves—not some anonymous “knowing subject,”there may be no conflation of knowledge and existence but a doubledramatization, of both the knower and the known. Furthermore,Whitehead’s dramatization also puts into a rather crude light thegeneralization that led, for instance, to the claims of a neurophysi-ologist objectively explaining the human so-called soul by someblind but functional interplay among neurons. In this case we seeneither the harmony of logic, nor the aesthetic harmony. Rather, wemay well conclude that if this scientist’s claims are taken seriously it

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 39

3. Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The Free Free Press,1967), p. 18.

is because they confirm the general ambition to have what does not feelobjectively explaining, somehow, what does feel. More generally, itseems nowadays that if you can refer to language, to culture, to biolog-ical selection, to states of the central nervous system, to society, to themarket, you will be able to claim the heritage of Galileo or Newton.

There may be many explanations for this strange generalization,as is always the case with history; but if we take history to be, asWhitehead proposes, “the record of the expressions of feelings pecu-liar to humanity,” it may be preferable not to criticize such a gener-alization (for instance, as a matter of misplaced belief, or of the mis-placed authority of physics). We may rather wonder about thepeculiar feeling recorded by the celebration of experimental successas exemplifying the very fulfillment of the aspiration of human ra-tionality. I would propose that such a celebration has to do not somuch with the many questions that nature or mankind may inspire,but rather with the possibility of explaining away such questions,leaving a rather depopulated scene organized around the conflict be-tween objective explanation and what would transcend it.

My proposition entails that at the center of this scene stand amuch older question, the question, “who is responsible for what?”What would have been generalized would indeed be the possibility,when we deal with experimental facts, to claim that scientists arenot responsible for their interpretation, that such an interpretationwas indeed demanded by the fact itself. The proliferation of nearlysufficient conditions would then feature a rather strange soul, whosefirst question is about responsibility, and who demands that there isan objective nature to bear the full responsibility for the way its or-der is characterized.

Here, with the overwhelming importance of the question “who isresponsible for what?” we may come back to the sixth-day account—the day, the Bible tells us, when Adam and Eve were created, as theones who would be responsible for the sin of eating the apple andfor the subsequent fate of humanity. The tale is that on the sixthday, when God gave souls to Adam and Eve, He also gave them thefreedom to sin, and the responsibility to choose between obedienceand disobedience. The easy modern acceptance of any so-called ob-jective explanation, which would explain away this freedom and re-sponsibility, does not so much amount to a rejection of this tale asto the claim that only science, not the Bible, may assign responsibil-ity. In other words, the modern account of the sixth day would be“He created the scientist”—triumphantly demonstrating the powerof scientific objectivity, explaining away gregarious beliefs, identify-ing superstitious mankind as part of the previous day’s creation.

40 Configurations

I am now able to address the singularity of Whitehead’s answer tothe question of the sixth day—that is, his proposition that we thinkof ourselves as creatures indeed, but not as creatures gifted with asoul: as creatures that, being given speech, became souls. White-head’s contrast between “to be given” and “to become” is intendedto lead us away from the modern meeting place crowded with theobsessive question of what is responsible for what. Whitehead triedto change the problem.

In order to introduce the meaning and scope of this change, I willadduce Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? ForDeleuze and Guattari, both Blaise Pascal and Sören Kierkegaard (whomeditated about the Christian soul) and Jean Paul Sartre (who didnot need God) belong to one and the same plane, characterized by anegative movement that enacts transcendent values against the con-ditioning by immediate interests. I personally would add to Pascal,Kierkegaard, and Sartre figures such as Jacques Monod and RichardDawkins for whom science is salvation, the only route we haveagainst the way natural selection has shaped us. Here are Deleuzeand Guattari:

The problem would change if it were another plane of immanence. It is not

that the person who does not believe God exists would gain the upper hand,

since he would still belong to the old plane as negative movement. But, on the

new plane, it is possible that the problem now concerns the one who believes

in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities

of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of

existence, closer to animals and rocks. It may be that believing in this world,

in this life, becomes our most difficult task. . . . This is the empiricist conver-

sion (we have so many reasons not to believe in the human world; we have

lost the world, worse than a fiancée or a God). The problem has indeed

changed.4

Empiricist conversion—believing in this world, in this life—maymean many things. Since my point of entry here is the account ofthe sixth day, I will concentrate on the reclaiming of the many ques-tions and aspirations that were expelled from the scene, as it was de-populated both by the biblical account and by modern so-called ob-jectivity. Because it all began with the Bible, when the veryinteresting differences related to the five first days—that is to say, therespective modes of existence of the rocks and of the animals—wereovershadowed by the importance of the sixth day, when He created

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 41

4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. G. Burchell and H.Tomlinson (London: Verso, 1994), pp. 74–75.

mankind in His own image, giving to Adam governance over every-thing that had been created before. Without details. In bulk.

If indeed the problem has changed—or, in Whiteheadian terms, ifindeed we belong to another epoch—it is not so astonishing thatspeculative philosophy, as the first victim of modern thought, de-prived of authority by both science and critique, may be with usagain. Not as the bearer of some new truth, but as experimenting inorder to find out how to escape the previous accounts of the sixthday. What is required is not to criticize them, which is easy enough,but to forge a new expression for the feelings of a creature whosesoul does not demand any longer to know first who is responsible.

To give you a taste of the risk required by this most strange andadventurous task of trying to believe in this world and in this life,our life, I would ask that you again listen to Whitehead, and feel thecontrast between this dramatization and the previous one, what weknew when we entertained the faith that there was a nature the log-ical necessity of which we could identify:

We require to understand how the unity of the universe requires its multiplic-

ity. We require to understand how infinitude requires the finite. We require to

understand how each immediately present existence requires its past, an-

tecedent to itself; and requires its future, an essential factor in its own exis-

tence. . . . And we require to understand how mere matter of fact refuses to be

deprived of its relevance to potentialities beyond its own actuality of realiza-

tion. . . . The discussion of present fact apart from reference to the past, to

concurrent present, and to future, and from reference to the preservation or

destruction of forms of creation is to rob the universe of essential importance.

In the absence of perspective there is triviality.5

We no longer know, but we require to understand. Understanding isnot knowing. Knowing is about closed facts, facts we are able to de-fine. As long as the supposedly closed order of nature was concerned,we knew, or did not, or hesitated, or discussed. The problem changeswhen it is no longer a matter of definition (the importance beingthen that it be the right one), but a matter of understanding. Under-standing entails for Whitehead an experience of transformative dis-closure, not the possibility of a definition, valid or invalid.

As a consequence, do not ask me to define understanding; in-stead, understand it from the experience of disclosure elicited byWhitehead’s “And we require to understand how mere matter of factrefuses to be deprived of its relevance to potentialities beyond itsown actuality of realization.” This requirement also concerns rocks

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5. Whitehead, Modes (above, n. 1), pp. 83–84.

and animals. We do not require the proof that their modes of exis-tence cannot be reduced to mere matters of fact, we require the ca-pacity never to reduce anything to a mere matter of fact, or matterof proof—to become able to feel its relevance to unrealized poten-tialities. This is the very cry of the Whiteheadian soul, the soul webecame on the sixth day. At the end of the chapter on “Understand-ing” in Modes of Thought, Whitehead indeed writes: “As we lose thissense of disclosure, we are shedding that mode of functioning whichis the soul.”6

“In the absence of perspective there is triviality.” Even when physi-cists approach the so-called great problem of the origins of the uni-verse, the possibility of triviality is present. When Stephen Weinbergfamously remarked that the more the universe seems comprehensible,the more it also seems pointless, he witnessed the problem of a com-prehension that produces triviality. And it is then of no use to addsome God behind the Big Bang, tuning the first instants in order toaccommodate the possibility of mankind, and of no use to speculateabout the means needed to provide for the immortality of mankindwhen the universe will be populated by black holes only. What is thepoint, really, in the grandiose dream of mankind surviving in theguise of a giant cosmic computer recording and computing data, data,data, which is the dream of some contemporary physicists? Thedeadly touch of triviality marks whatever connection we may seek toestablish between the universe as defined by contemporary physicsand the way the question of the universe matters for us as souls re-quiring understanding. I could, but will not, write the same aboutother grandiose hypotheses, such as an Intelligent Design being su-perimposed on Darwinian evolution. It is of no use since it does notsave the adventure of life from triviality but turns it into the mani-festation of a design, which still deprives living beings of their rele-vance to potentialities beyond their own actuality of realization.

How, then, should we understand the Whiteheadian version of thesixth day?

We already know the kind of temptation we should resist. Weshould beware of any claim linking this understanding with theheroic discovery of the pointless character of what mattered formankind before us—for instance, the Freudian epic story of the suc-cessive discovery that Man does not inhabit the center of the world,is not the crowning piece of the animal kingdom, and is not even,by the grace of Freud himself, master of his own consciousness. Butwe should be wary also of any heroic affirmation of the human free

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 43

6. Ibid., p. 62.

soul: I am not a rock, a root, or an animal; I am not my past, I amnot asking for any particular future, I am my decision, now. TheWhiteheadian answer would be: your own future and past, you maywell trivialize, if it does helps you to affirm that your present mat-ters, but what do you understand about rocks or roots, little man!

However, to go further, we meet a typical Whiteheadian difficulty.In Process and Reality, Whitehead’s “technical” book, we get no tech-nical approach to the question of the soul. Instead, we get a most de-finitive rejection of any substantial definition of the soul as an en-during entity: “The problem of the enduring soul with its permanentcharacteristics is exactly the irrelevant answer to the problem lifepresents. That problem is, How can there be originality? And the an-swer explains how the soul need be no more original than a stone.”7

For Whitehead, endurance is never an attribute, always an achieve-ment: throughout its adventures, something—I will come back tothe characterization of this “something”—succeeds in maintainingsome thread of conformity between past and present. Such anachievement is certainly required for us to become souls, it is a nec-essary condition if you wish, but now the problem has changed. Thequestion associated with the soul, “how can there be originality?”demands a positive answer. The distinction between “to be given”and “to become” will not be framed any longer in terms of condi-tions, be they sufficient or not.

But in Process and Reality, the word “soul” is never positively usedoutside comments on quotations from Hume. There is only onetechnical, rather offhand, remark, but it is quite an extraordinaryone: In his own philosophy, Whitehead writes “‘the soul’ as it ap-pears in Hume, and ‘the mind’ as it appears in Locke and Hume arereplaced by the phrases ‘the actual entity’, and ‘the actual occasion’,these phrases being synonymous.”8 Since I will not be able to pre-sent Whitehead’s God here, let me just emphasize that this “syn-onymous” remark is very important from that point of view. Indeed,in Whitehead’s philosophy, the only actual entity that is not an ac-tual occasion is God. Thus, the whole theological tradition aboutmankind being created in the image of God— and more precisely, ofGod conceived as starting from whatever image we produce aboutourselves—is repudiated in just four words. In Whitehead’s meta-physics, God is the only actual entity that cannot be characterized interms related to what Hume and Locke call “mind” or “soul.”

44 Configurations

7. Alfred N. Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected ed., ed.David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 104.

8. Ibid., p. 141.

We are very far, however, from an account of the sixth day. Actualentities are indeed the metaphysical concept for what Whitehead de-fines as res verae, the true things, the only things that may be said, inmetaphysical terms, to really exist. And it can be said that one of themetaphysical functions of actual entities is to state that, whateverdid happen on the sixth day, it does not require a new kind of meta-physical definition of what it means to “exist.”

Indeed, the strong singularity of Whitehead’s definition of what ex-ists is that it avoids any possible conflation of the categories of exis-tence and the kind of differences we would wish to explain—for in-stance, the difference between what we call an electron, a rock, arabbit, and ourselves. Actual entities are indeed meant to produce dis-connection between two versions of what it is “to explain.” Whatevertruly exists, whatever is a res vera, will be described as explaining it-self, causa sui; while whatever we are able to explain is not a res vera.

The point is not to wonder about the legitimacy of Whitehead’sspeculative definition of what truly exists, as if Process and Reality un-folded some kind of ultimate perspective. A perspective is certainlyproduced, but it cannot be separated from an experience of disclo-sure; and this experience does not concern actual entities as such,but the very possibility of changing the problem, to escape the oppositions our modern definitions induce. For Whitehead therecan be no ultimate, or right, perspective, because perspective cannotbe separated from importance. As soon as we define a perspective asa settled position of knowledge about something out there, we get“the dead abstraction of mere fact from the living importance ofthings felt. The concrete truth is the variation of interest.”9 Whatmatters for Whitehead is to induce such a variation of interest—“a”variation, never “the” variation that would get you to the right, fi-nal, perspective.

Process and Reality was written by a creature of the sixth day, whoaimed at a change in our “modes of thought,” enabling us to resistall perspectives that involve shedding that mode of functioningwhich is our soul. But you never resist in general. You may resist as apoet, as a teacher, as an activist for animal rights. Whitehead’s modeof resistance was that of a philosopher, directly working with thepowerful abstractions that dominate our modes of thought, not try-ing to bypass or denounce them, but endeavoring to produce a vari-ation in the interest they induce. More precisely, Whitehead’s modeof resistance implied fully experimenting with a demand for coher-ence and accepting its consequences, including the most adventurous

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 45

9. Whitehead, Modes (above, n. 1), p. 11.

ones. Such a demand has as one of its consequences that we resistthe idea that it is for mankind, and mankind only, that the distinc-tion between “to be given” and “to become” is relevant; that we re-sist the perspective that mankind is the only point in a pointless uni-verse; and also that we resist being the ones who would distributewhat is pointless—the mode of existence of a rock, for instance—and what is not: ourselves and maybe some selected animals. Thedistinction between “to be given” and “to become” must then con-cern whatever exists—that is, for Whitehead, whatever comes intobeing, that which he names “actual entities.”

Here I may finally quote Whitehead’s metaphysical definition of“becoming”: “In the becoming of an actual entity, the potentialunity of many entities in disjunctive diversity acquires the real unityof an actual entity.”10 What is initially given is always a “many,” adisjunction the unity of which is potential, that is, must be pro-duced. Becoming thus means acquiring real unity, not to be con-fused with the unfolding of some kind of unity that would be po-tentially there. The functioning of the actual entity in its process ofunification, of becoming one, is the crucial theme of the hundredsof pages of Process and Reality, and the stake of those pages is to pro-duce the concept of a subject deciding for itself how it will be ex-plained by what was given for its becoming—that is, how it willboth feel it and become the subject of this feeling. As the “principleof process” states, “how an actual entity becomes constitutes what anactual entity is.”11 And when the many that are what is felt, the feel-ing, and the feeler have come together into a real unity, the actualentity that now “is” no longer feels, no longer is a subject: it has at-tained what Whitehead calls “objective immortality,” and is addedto the many that will have to be felt by other subsequent entities.The many have become one, and are increased by one.

Do not ask how Whitehead demonstrates that unification cannotbe reduced to something that would explain away becoming. Such ademonstration would mean that we situate ourselves before thesixth day, or even before the first one, starting with the hypothesisof a world devoid of becoming and wondering if such a world is notsufficient to define ours. This is sheer incoherence, since what we de-fine as devoid of becoming presupposes becoming, that is, “us” be-coming able to form such a definition. Again, “there is no partingfrom your own shadow.” Becoming is not to be demonstrated, it is amatter of sheer disclosure.

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10. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 7), p. 22.

11. Ibid., p. 23.

In contrast, the question of “how an entity becomes” is the onefor which a demand for coherence may be positively put to work.Becoming is not to be demonstrated, but it must be characterized insuch a way that it does not blindly solve all questions, as somethingthat would transcend all reasons. If Whitehead needed so manypages, it is because he had accepted what he called the “ontologicalprinciple,” which states that “there is nothing which floats into theworld from nowhere,”12 thereby accepting the old rationalist claimthat everything has a reason, just adding that “actual entities are theonly reasons.”13 Again, there must be no conflation. No reason as wemay define reasons, no reason as a matter of knowledge, may ever pa-rade as the reason for the existence of anything.

We may now come back to the problem of the six days of cre-ation, wondering about the difference between a rock or a root anda writer in the process of writing—a writer stating, for instance, hisreasons for affirming that we have intentions or freedom while therock has none of that, or that the rock obeys the laws of nature whilewe do not. We know now that this writer is not talking in meta-physical terms, because the reasons, however we define them, thatwe give for those differences are not actual entities. As soon as wedeal with rocks, roots, or the writer, we deal with what Whiteheadcalls “societies,” and our characterizations of their contrasts are all“social explanations.” They are social because they address societies,but they are also social because the very problem of the relevantcharacterization is a social problem, as determined by settled per-spectives on ourselves as well as on rocks and roots.

Whatever we are able to characterize—rocks, roots, or ourselves aswe feel endowed with a continuing life of our own—are never actualentities, because the temporality of actual entities is atomic, “themany become one, and are increased by one.”14 They cannot endure,even for a fraction of a second. Whatever endures is a society of ac-tual entities and not a res vera. Thus whatever endures is never a rea-son, even for its own endurance. “Actual entities are the only rea-sons.” Societies depend on the fact that some actual entities acceptin their own becoming to conform to a common feature that otherentities they have to feel, also accepted, also conformed to. For eachof them, to be part of a society is to ratify in a positive manner, aspart of their self-definition, a way of feeling that was provided bytheir social environment. No particular society endures because of a

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 47

12. Ibid., p. 244.

13. Ibid., p. 24.

14. Ibid., p. 21.

power of its own; it endures just as long as the corresponding threadof conformity is not broken by actual entities.

It would be a sad mistake to conclude that since societies are notres vera, Whitehead, one way or another, downgrades them as if theywere illusions only. Endurance is, for better or worse, an achieve-ment, the achievement of a feature that goes on mattering. Thepoint with societies not being res vera is that nothing is endowedwith the right to go on mattering. Whenever we address something,be it ourselves or whatever we are able to empirically describe andcharacterize, Whitehead asks that we refrain from giving to thewords we use the power to produce justifications for what matters,transcending the empirical fact that it so matters. The relevance ofall justifications is correlated with a mode of endurance, and will belost if the conformity they depend upon is lost. No settled perspec-tive may claim authority. Weighty predicates, claiming both thepower to describe and the power to explain, such as intention, free-dom, or obedience to the laws of nature, produce poor descriptionsand transform what happens to be the case into what has to be thecase. “The concrete truth is variation of interest,” and Whiteheadiansocieties, which designate the whole of our knowledge as a form ofsociology, demand that any interesting definition be put at risk—that what matters be relevance, not the power to define and deduce.

As far as a society is stable, Whitehead’s concepts do not make agreat difference where functional descriptions are concerned. Physicsprovides a relevant sociology for societies characterized by the kindof conformity that experimental success depends upon. The inter-esting difference arises because with Whiteheadian societies youneed no special explanation for what escapes continuity, or for whatchallenges the very relevance of continuity. It happens in physics,but is quite dramatically the case with “that mode of functioningwhich is the soul.” There is nothing mystical when writers claimthat, in the process of writing something that matters, they are notjust hesitating, that the situation cannot be described in terms ofpossible choices and of an “I” as an enduring being, who would hes-itate between them. Indeed, the decisions that must be produced arealso decisions about who they are. It is a perfectly relevant charac-terization of an adventure whose mode of existence Whitehead’sconcepts are meant not to oppose to other modes—even to those ofwhat we call an electron, and certainly not to those which that ap-pear to be dominated by the search for reasons against any idea thatsomething could be said to be causa sui.

We are creatures of the sixth day, and what makes us rather par-ticular is that we are asking for reasons. The very fact that actual en-

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tities, as the only reasons from a metaphysical point of view, maymatter for us, may elicit disclosure, is in itself a witness that reasonsmatter in our very life. The efficacy of metaphysics is thus not to de-construct our reasons, but to divorce them from the obsession withjudgment assigning responsibility. The diverging ways in which rea-sons matter may well entail polemics, but insofar as we are dealingwith the account of the sixth day, we should state only that reasonsthen came to matter.

Whitehead’s version of Deleuze and Guattari’s empiricist conver-sion would thus emphasize that empiricism is not against reason,but asks us to feel how intensely reasons matter. We share with otherliving beings the high feat of being able to digest food—but we donot usually attribute worth to the fact that we manage to digest, oreven manage to walk on two feet without falling down, whateverthe importance of such successes for our survival. “The life of a hu-man being receives its worth, its importance, from the way in whichunrealized ideals shape its purposes and tinge its actions. The dis-tinction between men and animals is in one sense only a differencein degree. But the extent of the degree makes all the difference. TheRubicon has been crossed.”15

For Whitehead, the experiences that came to matter on the sixthday are those which may be associated with the intense feeling of al-ternative, unrealized possibilities: what we could have done and didnot do, what we could have chosen and decided not to. “Men arethe children of the Universe with foolish enterprises and irrationalhopes. A tree sticks to its business of mere survival, and so does anoyster with some minor divergencies. In this way, the life aim at sur-vival is modified into the human aim at survival for diversified,worthwhile experience.”16

We may be tempted to stop here. Speech, as a social (in White-head’s meaning of the term) characterization of the sixth day, wouldnot be “responsible,” since the only causes are actual entities. Butthe feeling of unrealized ideals that created the contrast betweensticking to our habitual business, whatever it is, and entertainingstrange ideas about what might be possible—foolish enterprises suchas explaining the world, irrational hopes such as understanding it—would mark the way our experience is framed by its linguistic envi-ronment. This may lead rather directly to what may be called an“anti-intellectualist stance.” We are prisoners of illusions induced bylanguage, by the capacity of language to abstract possibilities in the

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 49

15. Whitehead, Modes (above, n. 1), p. 27.

16. Ibid., p. 30.

concrete flux of situations, and to confront them with other abstractpossibilities, what could have happened and did not. Such a stancemay be favored by the academic “linguistic turn” that, sinceWittgenstein, has sought to cure us, leading us back to the businessof being alive that we are told we should stick to. Back to the fifthday! More seriously, it is also cultivated by wisdom traditions likeBuddhism.

However, in making language the social condition for the feelingof “unrealized possibilities,” we have just missed the problem of thesoul. This problem is not that of the “human soul,” explaining theimportance of unrealized ideals; more generally, the problem is nothumanity, as it crossed the Rubicon; instead, the metaphysical prob-lem is what this Rubicon, which we happened to cross, metaphysi-cally requires. We require to understand, not to be led back to themaze of language.

When we make language our creator, enticing the important feel-ing that our acts and choices not only decide what will be, but alsomake untrue what could have been and never will be, we explainaway this importance and stick again to the usual business of find-ing an explanation for human experience. And in so doing we alsodowngrade this human experience, describing it in terms of intel-lects dominated by linguistic abstractions, in contrast to the tree orthe oyster sticking to the concrete business of survival. What wehave forgotten is that if there are societies dominated by abstractionsit is the ones we name trees and oysters, rather than ourselves. Stick-ing to their business of survival is sticking to abstractions, making adefinite and rather stable difference between what this business de-fines as relevant and what does not matter. Instead, explaining awaythe sense of unrealized possibility in terms of linguistic artifacts, ex-perimenting with the contrast between our statements and what wefeel, dreaming of escaping the prison of our judgments, are all ad-ventures of souls—what we became when we were given speech, notwhat was given to us by speech.

Again, there is no parting from our own shadow. Even when wewander in the dreary landscape of modern abstractions, we are stillwitnesses testifying for what Whitehead called, in Science and theModern World, the “power of wandering”: “Mankind has wanderedfrom the trees to the plains, from the plains to the seacoast, from cli-mate to climate, from continent to continent, and from habit of lifeto habit of life. When man ceases to wander, he will cease to ascendin the scale of being.”17

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17. Whitehead, Science (above, n. 3), p. 207.

When humans cease to wander, they will cease to require to under-stand. Metaphysical understanding has thus to avoid giving languagethe power to make us wander, or entertain the feeling for “unrealizedpossibilities,”even if this feeling came to crucially matter on the sixthday, when we were given speech. To be given, since we can name whatwas given, refers to a social environment, a real potentiality for be-coming—in this case, for becoming a soul—but it will not explain“how there can be originality,” how we became able to entertainpossibility as such, that is, also able to tell tales about what couldhave been but never will be. Here is the metaphysical requirementimposed by the Rubicon we crossed: language must require, indeedpresuppose, the feeling of those tales that may be told; it must notcreate them. Human experience must testify to the existence of suchtales, not explain them.

These tales, to be distinguished from any verbal statement andfrom any conscious experience, are what Whitehead called “propo-sitions.” Propositions are members of the short metaphysical list ofwhat can be said to exist, what is required by the description of ac-tual entities as such. In other words: while what we call space, timeor matter, what we recognize as an objective explanation, are all so-cially constructed, depending on the endurance of societies, propo-sitions are not. The coming into existence of new propositions mayneed, and does need, a social environment, but it will not be ex-plained in social terms. The event of this coming into existencemarks the opening of a full range of new diverging possibilities forbecoming, and as such generally signifies a break in continuity, whatcan be called a social upheaval. “The concrete truth is the variationof interest.”

Propositions are thus Whitehead’s metaphysical answer to the de-mand that we not part from our own shadows, from the disclosurethat what we say or think may matter. Even the author of the mostradical deconstructivist critique cannot but hope that his or herstatement will break continuity, make a difference, at least if he orshe is not just sticking to the mere business of academic survival,thereby “shedding that mode of functioning which is the soul.” Butthe efficacy of propositions is not restricted to us, as creatures of thesixth day. As metaphysical existents, propositions are needed in or-der to give irreducible reasons not only for the experience of wordsinducing disclosure, a world felt in a different manner, but also forthe disruption, or variation of interest, that a rabbit or a dog may ex-perience; and finally, for the possibility of the kind of disruption ofsocial continuity that we may observe when even oysters or treesseem to forget about survival. “When a non-conformal proposition

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 51

is admitted into feeling . . . a novelty has emerged into creation. Thenovelty may promote or destroy order; it may be good or bad. But itis new, a new type of individual, and not merely a new intensity ofindividual feeling.”18

Consequently, propositions should not be confused with linguis-tic sentences. Instead they turn what linguists took as their objectinto a full Whiteheadian sociological field. Sentences have no iden-tity of their own. If I address somebody with “how are you?” or “thesalt, please,” we may speak of a stable society enacting a conformalproposition that is already part of the social environment. But utter-ing a sentence may also be a social adventure, when I do not quiteknow at the beginning how it will end, when I am not the same atthe beginning as at the end. A text also has no identity of its own,for its composition or reading may provide an opportunity for seem-ingly innocuous sentences to suddenly collide, to introduce unan-ticipated new possibilities. And some utterances, be they written orverbal, may be felt as “epoch-making,” when the extent of the dif-ference they make between past and present belongs to a future re-taining some memory of its own novelty.

The kind of sentences usually selected as exemplary by philoso-phers and linguists, like “the cat is on the mat” or “the session isclosed,” may have impact if the cat was considered lost, or the ses-sion was in full turmoil, but they are usually selected for their socialconformity—that is, for occulting or taming the efficacy of proposi-tions. “The interest in logic, dominating overintellectualizedphilosophers, has obscured the main function of propositions in thenature of things. They are not primarily for belief. . . . The primarymode of realization of a proposition in an actual entity is not byjudgement, but by entertainment. . . . Horror, relief, purpose, are pri-mary feelings involving the entertainment of propositions.”19

For Whitehead—here commenting on a “thought”—we may de-scribe a proposition’s efficacy as “a tremendous mode of excitement.Like a stone thrown into a pond it disturbs the whole surface of ourbeing. But this image is inadequate. For we should conceive the rip-ples as effective in the creation of the plunge of the stone into thewater. The ripples release the thought, and the thought augmentsand distorts the ripples.”20 Any new proposition, as it impacts, has adisruptive power that may have the consequence of the rabbit’s run-

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18. Whitehead, Process (above, n. 7), p. 209.

19. Ibid., pp. 186–188.

20. Whitehead, Modes (above, n. 1), p. 36.

ning away, suddenly aware of what we would call “a wolf!” In deal-ing with a thought, we may feel that the meaning does not belongto the proposition, but to the full event rippling down. But this istrue even when the object of a nonverbal perception seems fully toexplain a rabbitlike reaction. To ask for the meaning of a propositionis to confuse the creation of the stone-plus-ripples event with a de-duction of the ripples from the stone’s impact, or with a stone’s free-fall motion, which may indeed be defined by a set of differentialequations.

If, on the sixth day, being given speech, we became souls, it isthus not because we entertain propositions: so does a rabbit, or anoyster, or a living cell—even if, in the case of an oyster or a cell, ourimagination is limited, and we find it difficult to feel like an oysteror a cell. We became souls because of the difference that languagemakes in the rippling consequences of a proposition’s impact. Beinggiven language means that when a proposition is entertained it isgiven a social environment such that its impact may be amplifiedinto many divergent, entangled consequences, activating that modeof functioning which is the soul.

The “crossing of the Rubicon” that Whitehead attributes tomankind cannot be equated with a defining break, the precise iden-tification of which would allow a definition of all the differences wecare for, all that matter for us. It rather causes us to wander and won-der. Just think about the historical, epoch-making, crossing of theRubicon: how do we identify the differences it made for Caesar, forhis soldiers, for the Roman Senate, and still makes now even forthose who have never heard about this river and the special role itplayed in Roman laws and traditions? Such a crossing was not abreak, since it entailed the continuity of the Roman historical, polit-ical environment. For Caesar’s horse it was probably an experienceof wetness like many others. But it started a number of diverging so-cial adventures that we cannot begin to enumerate, it gave their rel-evance to a novel, open set of propositions, including Whitehead’suse of it, my own comment about this use, and your own associa-tions elicited by this comment. All this is still rippling down, andwill go on rippling as long as “Crossing the Rubicon” impinges onour experience.

However, as Whitehead loved to repeat, “we should not exagger-ate.” In this case we should not exaggerate our difference from a rabbit. Sometimes we feel the ripple, sometimes we do not, as whenwe hear “the salt, please” and do not feel that it was meant to inter-rupt us, to express indifference to or annoyance against the so veryinteresting things we were talking about. Soul is a mode of func-

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tioning that occasionally happens, not the ultimate truth of our ex-perience.

But we could then ask, and it will be my last question, whetherWhitehead himself did not exaggerate when he chose to give thesame name, “soul,” both to that mode of functioning that speechenhanced, and to actual occasions (remember his reading of Hume,substituting the actual occasion for the Humean soul). Would thismean that, for Whitehead, in being given speech, we also becameable to escape our own social, historical, epochal adventure, andreach toward a metaphysical truth that transcends any epoch?

The question should rather be: why did Whitehead use such a“human” term as “soul” to characterize actual occasions? And thisquestion can then extend to many other speculative names he used(including “God”). I would propose that the answer is that philoso-phy aims at “sheer disclosure,”21 and not at an intellectual intuitiontranscending any epoch. Whitehead designed his naming strategy inorder to arouse a “sense of disclosure” whose aim was to “change theproblem,” to pay attention and believe in this world, not to judge itin terms of generalities. But he knew that no one is able to drain thepond upon which new propositions impact. Whatever the proposi-tions, it is this epochal pond, the modern dense entanglement ofsettled perspectives and preoccupations, that they will impact. Thenaming strategy, then, has for its aim to produce thoughts the pri-mary value of which should be to induce the experience of both theripples and the pond, to induce a mode of excitement disclosing thepossibility of affirming both what modern habits of thought denied,and what they took for granted.

Whitehead’s speculative philosophy makes full use of languagenot as an expression of claims, to be evaluated, accepted or rejectedas such, but rather as providing a social environment for the specu-lative reception of propositions. Speculative language should be ableto induce not the reaction of the rabbit becoming aware that thisgrey shade is what we call a wolf, that is, a convinced “it matters!”but a speculative adventure entailing questions such as “how does itmatter?” “does it really matter?” “what if I accepted that it does notmatter?” “how did it come to matter?”—unrealized ideals then shap-ing our experiences. Such questions, which turn what is sociallygiven, the empirical fact that something matters, into a potential formany diverging adventures, are the ones we cannot explain becausethey are presupposed by any particular explanation.

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21. Ibid., p. 49.

It is thus because philosophers cannot part from their own shad-ows that Whitehead, as a philosopher, gave the same name, “soul,”to that speculative mode of functioning we may become, occasion-ally, since we have been given speech, and to those speculative ac-tual occasions the very reason of which is to affirm that what isgiven is always a potential for becoming. The mode of excitementthat Whitehead’s philosophy is designed to induce is not how it feelsto become a soul in general, but how it feels to become a soul that re-quires to understand.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to Didier Debaise and Steven Meyer for their carefulreading and relevant suggestions.

And a very deep gratitude to Donna Haraway, who pointed out thatin the Biblical account of the sixth day, God created not only hu-mans but also “the beasts of the earth after their kind, and the cattleafter their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after itskind.” This was quite a busy day indeed, and Whitehead’s account isquite a partial one, perhaps expressing the feeling that we “humans”deserved our own special creation day. Furthermore, it is strikingthat, while Adam and Eve were created as individuals, the beasts,cattle, and creeping creatures are defined by their “kind,” as if a gen-eral definition was sufficient where they are concerned. This is notan “erudite only” remark at all, but an enlightening one, luring at-tention to an important point left aside in this text, that is, the chal-lenge of bridging the Rubicon that we claim to have crossed. Weneed propositions that would reconsider the long and many-facetedhistory of our cohabitation with the other creatures of this busysixth day, and would activate the importance of new modes ofthinking and feeling the togetherness of our lives.

Stengers / Whitehead’s Account of the Sixth Day 55