Luca Vanzago's Concrescence and Transition offers a novel phenomenological account of subjectivity drawing from his prior work on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature and time. He employs a careful and thorough examination of Whitehead's process philosophy, frequently utilizing large block quotes both in text and in footnotes to support his interpretations. He argues, contrary to many popular interpretations, that Whitehead's philosophy focuses on subjectivity by transforming it into an inherent…
Read moreLuca Vanzago's Concrescence and Transition offers a novel phenomenological account of subjectivity drawing from his prior work on Merleau-Ponty's philosophy of nature and time. He employs a careful and thorough examination of Whitehead's process philosophy, frequently utilizing large block quotes both in text and in footnotes to support his interpretations. He argues, contrary to many popular interpretations, that Whitehead's philosophy focuses on subjectivity by transforming it into an inherently relational process rather than the common view of subjective identity in terms of essence or self-sameness. Vanzago particularly emphasizes the relationship between temporality and experience, which gives rise to subjectivity as the result of the mutual nonlinear processes of concrescence and transition. While this introduces a problem of the endurance of the subject, he argues that Whitehead solves this problem through a reinterpretation of Plato's concept of chora as the “place” of the enduring processual subject. Vanzago concludes by combining insights from Merleau-Ponty and Whitehead into a new account of phenomenological subjectivity as a relational process. This process is inseparable from the world while still being different from it, and it is both one in its plurality and plural in its singularity.Vanzago takes a methodical approach to this challenging and nuanced subject through three lengthy chapters. The first offers a genealogical account of Whitehead's corpus prior to Process and Reality, demonstrating (in opposition to the popular view of a break or deviation in Whitehead's thought) that there is a natural and consistent trajectory throughout his early mathematical works as predecessors to his later speculative philosophy. He argues that Whitehead gradually shifted from mathematics into epistemology by the publication of “Space, Time, and Relativity” in 1915, which emphasizes the primacy of perception as a source of relationality, a notion that subsequently developed into an emphasis on process over time due to his conviction that the latter is a formalized abstraction of the former. By the time of The Concept of Nature, Whitehead has shifted fully into philosophy, emphasizing Nature as an experiential totality of events while distinctly avoiding the consideration of subjectivity. Vanzago takes these early emphases on perception and experience to be inherently tied to his later account of subjectivity in Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. The primary implication he takes from these earlier works is the conviction that, for Whitehead, time and perception (and by extension subjectivity) are mutually and directly coimplicated if not cocreative.This last implication remains open to interpretation. Vanzago notes that throughout Whitehead's early works, there is the development of the notion that knowledge of reality is based on perception or experience and that extension is primary, with geometric points as merely derivative, an insight that is fundamental to his metaphysics. He also notes that Whitehead rejects the appearance/reality distinction found in Kant (and preserved in phenomenology) in favor of a view where perception is a reduction or simplification of reality rather than a creation of the subject. Vanzago argues that Whitehead is “indicating, albeit in an involuted and vague way” (76) that perception and temporality are circular in that each depends upon the other. However, I take this to be a reduction of Whitehead to the phenomenological, since it assumes that, for there to be perception, or experience, or a point of view, there must be a subject. Vanzago is concerned with determining what this presumed subject must be for Whitehead without considering the possibility that it is an inherently phenomenological question implicitly derived from the noesis/noema distinction inherent to intentionality. Since Whitehead is starting from an original, nonphenomenological perspective, he might not see this question as relevant given his prioritization of process, which takes the very acts of perceiving or experiencing as primary without any need to appeal to a subject. That said, Vanzago's phenomenological interpretation of Whitehead in this way remains instrumentally valuable to his overall argument; however, it should not necessarily be attributed to Whitehead.The second chapter deals with Whitehead's account of subjectivity in his speculative works, especially Process and Reality and Adventures of Ideas. He frequently notes the affinities between Whitehead's and Merleau-Ponty's respective projects, often arguing that the latter's philosophy is useful in explaining some of the ambiguities in the former. (In this regard, Vanzago continues the earlier work of William Hamrick and Jan Vanderveken to bring Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty together.) Vanzago especially emphasizes the similarities in both thinkers’ critiques of substantialism and the notion of a static or transcendental subject found in Husserl and Kant. He likewise notes their similarities in emphasizing the dialectic or relationality between subject and world, as well as the inherently incarnate nature of subjectivity. Of particular importance is the notion of subjectivity as the result of this process, through what Whitehead terms “actual entities.” Especially relevant to this concept is that actual entities possess the twofold nature of subject-superject, with the former referring to its experiential self-realization and the latter referring to it being relationally experienced by other actual entities. This subject-superject duality emphasizes that for Whitehead being can only be interpreted as a relational processual becoming rather than as a static or enduring subjective identity. Vanzago properly emphasizes that for Whitehead the actual entity is not the fundamental aspect of reality in a compounded “atomic” sense but is instead an interrelational process. Finally, he takes these texts as additional evidence of his prior claim that for Whitehead an experiencing subject is necessary for temporality as much as it is dependent on temporality.A limitation of Vanzago's approach in this chapter (and much of the book) is that it requires a familiarity with Merleau-Ponty, or at least with Vanzago's prior work on Merleau-Ponty, The Voice of No One, since his presentation of Whitehead is nearly always directly compared to a particular analogous notion in Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. Readers unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty or Vanzago's prior work might not be aware that Merleau-Ponty read and was influenced by Whitehead, especially the former's later works on nature. This fact makes the affinity between the two thinkers obvious, since they were far from fully independent projects, with Whitehead having an undeniable effect on Merleau-Ponty's later thought. The emphasis on Merleau-Ponty restricts the accessibility of the book among general readers in philosophy who are unfamiliar with Merleau-Ponty and/or Whitehead and raises a slight worry that Vanzago might be seeing more Merleau-Ponty in Whitehead than one should reasonably conclude. However, it does make Whitehead much more accessible to Merleau-Ponty scholars and may spur interest in Merleau-Ponty among Whitehead scholars. For this reason, as well as for its originality, it remains a valuable addition to the literature.In the third chapter, Vanzago elucidates his interpretation of the temporality of the subject in Whitehead. He takes his prior interpretation of the codetermination of subjectivity and temporality to be necessary to abandon the transcendentalist presupposition latent in phenomenology, which mistakenly prioritizes the subject over time. Central to this chapter is a concern for adequately explaining what an “enduring” subject is for Whitehead, since actual entities are, in Whitehead's terms, perpetually perishing in their subjective immediacy and thus lack substantial endurance. Vanzago begins by providing a strong account of temporality within a single actual entity as a process of concrescence and transition, which are distinct but inseparable. Concrescence refers to the effect other actual entities have in the manifestation of a single actual entity, while transition refers to the perpetual perishing of the actual entity into an objective datum for other actual entities. Thus, the actual entity is simultaneously involved in the passage from the actual to the “merely real” through transition as well as the reciprocal effect through concrescence. This dual process creates the present as the place and effect of experience for the actual entity and leads to Vanzago's argument that for Whitehead the actual entity literally is time and is nonlinearly temporal. This bears some resemblance to a presentist account of time, albeit one that is firmly relativistic and emerges through the interactions between subject and world. Regarding the “enduring” subject, he argues that in Adventures of Ideas, Whitehead utilizes a modification of the Platonic notion of chora to explain how “societies” (mutual aggregations of actual entities “united” by form) impose their own unity on nature without ever being separate or independent from nature. Vanzago concludes by arguing that Whitehead provides a logico-ontological foundational structure that, when combined with Merleau-Ponty's insights, offers the possibility of a new phenomenologically relational concept of subjectivity and its temporality.This chapter builds upon the prior assumptions of actual entities acting as subjectivities that are codeterminate with temporality. To me, this view of temporality describes Merleau-Ponty's view better than Whitehead's. After all, as early as Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty states that “[t]he objective world is too full for there to be time” and “[t]ime must be understood as subject, and the subject must be understood as time.” The distinction between the two views can be clarified by a closer examination of part 4 of Process and Reality, which is generally underappreciated by philosophers. Vanzago dismisses it as merely offering a foundation for scientific analysis when it actually adds a significant clarification of how we are to understand Whitehead's metaphysical structure. Drawing on his early mathematical works, part 4 provides a proto-mereotopology that clarifies the primacy of extensive connection as an undivided (atomic) yet divisible whole. The implications of this are well elucidated in a recent interpretation of Whitehead by Auxier and Herstein that posits that his philosophy is principally one of explanation rather than metaphysics or ontology in their more common understandings. In this view, the first (and therefore primordial) division of the extensive continuum is temporality, from which all other divisions are derived. This implies that rather than actual entities being temporalization that both constitutes and is constituted by time (as Vanzago suggests), actual entities could instead be viewed as a quantum or unit of explanation that are temporal divisions (or “drops” of time in Whitehead's terminology) of the extensive continuum for the purpose of description or analysis. In this regard, actual entities are not themselves subjectivities but become subject-superjects through the satisfaction (or completion) of their concrescence. In this interpretation, time is prior to subjectivity, and thus subjectivity is not necessary for time since it is a derivative aspect of temporal division rather than a determining character of its emergence. That said, this is a relatively minor criticism that is far from fatal to Vanzago's argument. His use of Merleau-Ponty to offer a phenomenological interpretation of subjectivity inspired by elements of Whitehead's philosophy remains a powerful tool that he leverages well in his overall project.Despite its minor weaknesses, Concrescence and Transition remains an impressive and meticulously researched contribution to the philosophy of subjectivity. It is well organized and well argued, and it offers a robust account of subjectivity that escapes the limitations of transcendental and substantialist accounts in favor of a more naturalistic and dynamically processual conceptualization. While it is somewhat inaccessible to general readers of philosophy, it brings together two immensely important figures whose respective works contain significant overlap and compatibility.
