one more point (sort of) to Shaviro

One of the most memorable tips I ever heard in graduate school came from Michael Naas at DePaul. He didn’t make it to me personally, though. A classmate of mine defended a dissertation proposal on Merleau-Ponty and Schelling, and I attended the proposal defense.

Naas liked the proposal. He said that he found the comparison between Merleau-Ponty and Schelling to be absolutely convincing as my classmate presented it. But he added an interesting maxim: “This is a comparison/contrast dissertation, and what is usually interesting in such cases are the contrasts.”

I hadn’t thought of it that way before, but I’ve never forgotten the point. Comparisons are inherently dangerous moments. And this is what I was thinking of again when reading the Whitehead/Deleuze comparison, since the differences are so sharp.

Granted, it’s a double-edged sword, since it can be used even against my own preferred groupings. So let me recall what I said when grouping Whitehead with Latour. I still think it’s a very strong pairing, but of course there are contrasts as well. And there are many, if we list them in a chart. But the question is: which is the most important?

In my opinion, the biggest difference is that for Whitehead, prehensions (relations) are mediated through the eternal objects, which ultimately means: through God. In that sense, Whitehead remains close to classical occasionalism.

For Latour, by contrast, any entity can be a mediator, and there is nothing like eternal objects in Latour’s philosophy at all. (And it is not rare for admirers of Whitehead to be suspicious of the eternal objects; even Charles Hartshorne never liked them.)

There are problems with Latour’s mediators as well, as I argue in Prince of Networks. But they are not the same problems faced by Whitehead.