‘Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’—Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead

Abstract

While long ignored, the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead has attracted considerable interest and wide academic reception since the 2000s. One reason for the renewed interest in Whitehead’s work is most certainly that his philosophy and concepts offer a way out of dualistic schemes of thought that have dominated the conceptual framework of the West since modernity. In my paper, I focus on Whitehead’s undoing of the opposition between nature and subjectivity, for it is a crucial aspect of Whitehead’s concept of nature not to exclude subjectivity from the ‘realm of nature’. For Whitehead, subjectivity is a fundamental feature of the whole of reality and by no means exclusively human, leading to a radically non-anthropocentric, pluralistic notion of the subject.

Keywords

• Alfred North Whitehead
• philosophy of nature
• philosophy of subjectivity
• metaphysics
• Donna J. Haraway