Alexander Nekvasil commented on the Latour essay:
> Critical philosophy (most of philosophy, really) grows
> out of the distancing of common sense, building upon it
> and deconstructing it at the same time, yet nowadays
> common sense is a game of lights in the mass media,
> constructed, privatized, governmentalized: information
> (Bacon's _potentia_: "Superimposing a new form on a
> given body")
>
> It may well be that the more conservative minded
> (Arendt, McLuhan) have grasped that transition better --
> with the notable exception of the much vilified Jean
> Baudrillard, of course.
I don't think Latour is approaching "common sense" in the way this seems to suggest. He identifies Whitehead with the "renewal of empiricism" and the kind of "realism" a new critical philosophy requires. Whitehead is the source of his idea of "matters of concern."
Whitehead appropriates the "Quaker word 'concern', divested of any suggestion of knowledge" to express "the fundamental structure of experience" (Adventures of Ideas, Chap. XI, "Objects and Subjects," p. 176). According to him, "concernedness is of the essence of perception." (p. 180) This is one of grounds in experience on which he bases his rejection of scientific materialism, i.e. of the ontological idea that reality is "made up of vacuous bits of matter with no internal values, and merely hurrying through space." (Modes of Thought, p. 158)
The claim that "concernednes is of the essence of perception" is the basis of his rejection of the scientific materialist conception of nature as "lifeless" and of his own conception of it as "alive."
"Life is the enjoyment of emotion, derived from the past and aimed at the future. It is the enjoyment of emotion which was then, which is now, and which will be then. This vector character is of the essence of such entertainment.
"The emotion transcends the present in two ways. It issues from, and it issues towards. It is received, it is enjoyed, and it is passed along, from moment to moment. Each occasion is an activity of concern, in the Quaker sense of that term. It is the conjunction of transcendence and immanence. The occasion is concerned in the way of feeling and aim, with things that in their own essence lie beyond it; although these things in their present functions are factors in the concern of that occasion. Thus each occasion, although engaged in its own immediate self-realization, is concerned with the universe." (Modes of Thought, p. 167)
This is part of his reworking of the conventional sensationalist conception of experience and of "empiricism." He accepts what he calls the "general form" of the "axiom" of "empiricism," namely, that all knowledge is derived from, and verified by, direct intuitive observation," but rejects the "sense data" account of experience derived from Hume. (Adventures of Ideas, pp. 177-8) In contraast to what Latour claims, this idea that "all knowledge is conscious discrimination of objects experienced" (p. 177) is the same as Husserl's idea of "phenomenology." Summary statements both of his idea of "empiricism" and of the reworking of ontology he bases on it are available in chap. XI of Adventures of Idea and chaps. VII and VIII of Modes of Thought.
Latour's essay is available on his web site:
<http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/089.html>
.
> Alfred North Whitehead famously said "the recourse to metaphysics is
> like throwing a match into a powder magazine. It blows up the whole
> arena."23 I cannot avoid getting into it because I have talked so much
> about weapon systems, explosion, iconoclasm, and arenas. Of all the
> modern philosophers who tried to overcome matters of fact, Whitehead
> is the only one who, instead of taking the path of critique and
> directing his attention away from facts to what makes them possible as
> Kant did; or adding something to their bare bones as Husserl did; or
> avoiding the fate of their domination, their Gestell, as much as
> possible as Heidegger did; tried to get closer to them or, more
> exactly, to see through them the reality that requested a new
> respectful realist attitude. No one is less a critic than Whitehead,
> in all the meanings of the word, and it's amusing to notice that the
> only pique he ever directed against someone else was against the other
> W., the one considered, wrongly in my view, as the greatest
> philosopher of the twentieth century, not W. as in Bush but W. as in
> Wittgenstein.
>
> What set Whitehead completely apart and straight on our path is that
> he considered matters of fact to be a very poor rendering of what is
> given in experience and something that muddles entirely the question
> What is there? with the question How do we know it? as Isabelle
> Stengers has shown recently in a major book about Whitehead's
> philosophy.24 Those who now mock his philosophy don't understand that
> they have resigned themselves to what he called the "bifurcation of
> nature." They have entirely forgotten what it would require if we were
> to take this incredible sentence seriously: "For natural philosophy
> everything perceived is in nature. We may not pick up and choose. For
> us the red glow of the sunset should be as much part of nature as are
> the molecules and electric waves by which men of science would explain
> the phenomenon" (CN, pp. 28–29).
>
> All subsequent philosophies have done exactly the opposite: they have
> picked and chosen and, worse, they have remained content with that
> limited choice. The solution to this bifurcation is not, as
> phenomenologists would have it, adding to the boring electric waves
> the rich lived world of the glowing sun. This would be simply make the
> bifurcation greater. The solution, or rather the adventure, according
> to Whitehead, is to dig much further into the realist attitude and to
> realize that matters of fact is a totally implausible, unrealistic,
> unjustified definition of what it is to deal with things:
>
>> Thus matter represents the refusal to think away spatial and temporal
>> characteristics and to arrive at the bare concept of an individual
>> entity. It is this refusal which has caused the muddle of importing
>> the mere procedure of thought into the fact of nature. The entity,
>> bared of all characteristics except those of space and time, has
>> acquired a physical status as the ultimate texture of nature; so that
>> the course of nature is conceived as being merely the fortunes of
>> matter in its adventure through space. [CN, p. 20]
>
> It is not the case that there would exist solid matters of fact and
> that the next step would be for us to decide whether they will be used
> to explain something. It is not the case either that the other
> solution is to attack, criticize, expose, historicize those matters of
> fact, to show that they are made up, interpreted, flexible. It is not
> the case that we should rather flee out of them into the mind or add
> to them symbolic or cultural dimensions; the question is that matters
> of fact are a poor proxy of experience and of experimentation, and, I
> would add, a confusing bundle of polemics, of epistemology, of
> modernist politics that can in no way claim to represent what is
> requested by a realist attitude.25
>
> Whitehead is not an author known for keeping the reader wide awake,
> but I want to indicate at least the direction of the new critical
> attitude with which I wish to replace the tired routines of most
> social theories.
>
> The solution lies, it seems to me, in this promising word gathering
> that Heidegger had introduced to account for the "thingness of the
> thing." Now, I know very well that Heidegger and Whitehead would have
> nothing to say to one another, and yet, the word the latter used in
> Process and Reality to describe "actual occasions," his word for my
> matters of concern, is the word societies. It is also, by the way, the
> word used by Gabriel Tarde, the real founder of French sociology, to
> describe all sorts of entities. It is close enough to the word
> association I have used all along to describe the objects of science
> and technology. Andrew Pickering would use the words "mangle of
> practice."26 Whatever the words, what is presented here is an entirely
> different attitude than the critical one, not a flight into the
> conditions of possibility of a given matter of fact, not the addition
> of something more human that the inhumane matters of fact would have
> missed, but, rather, a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of
> anthropology, philosophy, metaphysics, history, sociology to detect
> how many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to
> maintain its existence. Objects are simply a gathering that has
> failed—a fact that has not been assembled according to due process.27
> The stubbornness of matters of fact in the usual scenography of the
> rock-kicking objector—"It is there whether you like it or not"—is much
> like the stubbornness of political demonstrators: "the U.S., love it
> or leave it," that is, a very poor substitute for any sort of vibrant,
> articulate, sturdy, decent, long-term existence.28 A gathering, that
> is, a thing, an issue, inside a Thing, an arena, can be very sturdy
> too, on the condition that the number of its participants, its
> ingredients, nonhumans as well as humans, be not limited in advance.29
> It is entirely wrong to divide the collective, as I call it, into the
> sturdy matters of fact, on the one hand, and the dispensable crowds,
> on the other. Archimedes spoke for a whole tradition when he
> exclaimed: "Give me one fixed point and I will move the Earth," but am
> I not speaking for another, much less prestigious but maybe as
> respectable tradition, if I exclaim in turn "Give me one matter of
> concern and I will show you the whole earth and heavens that have to
> be gathered to hold it firmly in place"? For me it makes no sense to
> reserve the realist vocabulary for the first one only. The critic is
> not the one who debunks, but the one who assembles. The critic is not
> the one who lifts the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers,
> but the one who offers the participants arenas in which to gather. The
> critic is not the one who alternates haphazardly like the drunk
> iconoclast drawn by Goya between antifetishism and positivism, but the
> one for whom, if something is constructed, then it means it is fragile
> and thus in great need of care and caution. I am aware that to get at
> the heart of this argument one would have to renew also what it means
> to be a constructivist, but I have said enough to indicate the
> direction of critique, not away but toward the gathering, the Thing.30
> Not westward, but, so to speak, eastward.31
Ted