Process philosophy and healthcare - Part 6

Some practical applications, resources and readings

Waves crash against the harbour wall in Porthcawl. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images. Source.

Over the course of the last six episodes I have attempted to sketch a broad picture of process philosophy, an approach that is garnering advocates and critics in equal measure.

Process philosophy seems to appeal most to people who are frustrated with traditional ways of thinking, be it bio-scientific, subjectivist or critical, and centres around their unexamined humanism, transcendentalism, and static substance-based metaphysics.

But if you were interested in doing more process philosophy yourself, where could you start? First some practical suggestions, then some resources and reading recommendations.

Practical implications

To be schooled as a Western researcher or trained in a Western health profession is to be inculcated into a world of stable, quantifiable, taxonomically identifiable ‘things’ that function as an incredibly effective but no less abstract and disconnecting screen for the constantly churning, folding, contracting and relaxing, thickening and loosening processes that really makes up universal life.

So the first thing to say about practical implications of process philosophy is that to do it properly is very hard. There is simply too much invested in substance-based thinking in our schools, universities, workplaces, media and social systems to allow for much fluid thought.

There are openings, though, for all of us, through creative side-projects, speculative works in theory, and playful experiments in doing something different that can, if only briefly, explore a world beyond the mundane demands of paying the ferryman.

That might involve finding new modes of expression, like Oulipo-style experiments in writing, avoiding all forms of measurement (so no clocks, tape measures, questionnaires, scores and scales), or purposefully rejecting the conventions of mainstream quantitative and qualitative research.

It might mean deliberately avoiding any reference to bodies or minds in an ‘organised’ sense (think here of Deleuze’s bodies-without-organs), or being aware of our tendency to animate and ‘enliven’ brute matter with references to relational acts, assemblages or induced forms of motion, thereby ignoring our inadvertent assumption that matter was stable to begin with.

(Human) language itself might be a problem (think here of Deleuze’s ‘schizo’). So new modes of expression through sound, image, mathematics, or performance might be generative.

Breaking with the idea that inquiry should be purposeful, goal-directed, teleological, or guided by transcendental rules, social conventions, or norms might also be a fruitful way to break free from the world of productivist research thinking and practice with which we are all so familiar.

And what about writing something — or even just thinking something! — that doesn’t rush to be understandable, effective, powerful or translational?¹ Instead, follow Deleuze’s primary motivation and try to produce something radically new.

‘Deleuze never provides an interpretation of the thinkers he is discussing; he is uninterested in hermeneutics, uninterested in teasing out ambiguities and contradictions, uninterested in deconstructing prior thinkers or in determining ways in which they might be entrenched in metaphysics. All this is in accord with Deleuze’s own philosophy: his focus is on invention, on the New, on the “creation of concepts.” It’s not a matter of saying, for instance, that Plato and Aristotle and St. Augustine were wrong about the nature of time, and Kant or Bergson are right. Rather, what matters to Deleuze is the sheer fact of conceptual invention: the fact that Kant, and then Bergson, invent entirely new ways of conceiving time and temporality, leading to new ways of distributing, classifying, and understanding phenomena, new perspectives on Life and Being. A creation of new concepts means that we see the world in a new way, one that wasn’t available to us before. This is what Deleuze looks for in the history of philosophy, and this is why (and how) he is concerned, not with what a given text “really” means, but rather with what can be done with it, how it can be used, what other problems and other texts it can be brought into conjunction with. Deleuze writes about philosophers whose ideas he can use, or transform, in order to work through the problems he is interested in’ Link

The writings of people like Deleuze and Whitehead especially are famously obtuse (although Bergson and Nail are much more accessible). But what many readers don’t understand is that they are not trying to be your friend. Deleuze especially is trying to break with the pedagogical convention of centuries of philosophy by not leading you, the reader, down an arrow-straight floral path from one logical proposition to another until you arrive at the conclusion the writer intended all along. If anything, he’s trying to get you lost, destabilise you, throw you into the weeds, and make you find your way out. So perhaps his example is in part designed to give you some encouragement to try the same thing for yourself; even if it’s only for a moment?²

This is all very daunting but reading more process philosophy can certainly help.

So, if you are keen to go deeper and explore ways you might think as flow not fixity, here are some tentative recommendations.

Key readings

Thinking with Whitehead - Isabelle Stengers’ comprehensive introduction to Alfred North Whitehead’s work. Stengers has used Whitehead’s work extensively and is also a deep reader of Deleuze, so makes lots of connections between the two. You could try to read Whitehead’s seminal Process and Reality but it is considered one of the most obtuse books in the philosophy, so perhaps start with some secondary literature, such as Matthew David Segall’s excellent Footnotes2Plato Substack site.

For a Pragmatics of the Useless - Erin Manning’s 2020 book gives a practical guide to thinking with Whitehead, Deleuze, Massumi and others, and using these authors to offer new insights into neurotypicality, black studies, autism, and language.

Living in Time - Barry Allen’s very readable introduction to the work of Henri Bergson — a readable philosopher in his own right. Covering all of Bergson’s major works and themes, including consciousness, creative evolution, duration, intuition and memory, Allen explains why Bergson’s work proved so shocking in the early C20, but also why people are now turning back to his ideas, especially in areas like quantum physics and consciousness studies.

Difference and Repetition - Along with Logic of Sense, perhaps the greatest of Deleuze’s masterpieces. D&R is perhaps the best distillation of Deleuze’s development of process philosophy. These books came after his critical readings on Bergson, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Nietzsche, and Spinoza but before his anti-oedipal collaborations with Félix Guattari. Along with What is Philosophy? D&R and LoS marks the clearest statement of Deleuze’s metaphysics.

The Philosophy of Movement - Thomas Nail’s most recent work and the summation of a decade of books beginning with migration studies and ending with a thoroughgoing and highly original critique of the stasis underpinning everything we think in Western science. Highly recommended.

Some additional readings

Asuquo, G. O., Umotong, I. D., & Dennis, O. (2022). A critical exposition of Bergson’s process philosophy. International Journal of Humanities and Innovation, 5(3), 104–109. https://doi.org/10.33750/ijhi.v5i3.154

Bergson, H. (1910). Time and Free Will. (Trans. F.L. Pogson). George Allen and Unwin.

De Boer, T. J. (2022). The Philosophy of Henri Bergson. Bergsoniana, 2. https://doi.org/10.4000/bergsoniana.833

Delafield-Butt, J. (2012) Whitehead's philosophy of organism, satisfaction, and mental health. In: Mental Health and the Disciplines Symposium, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, The University of Edinburgh.

Godfrey-Smith, P. (2024). Living on Earth: Forests, Corals, Consciousness, and the Making of the World. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Goff, P. 2023). Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Oxford University Press.

Hallword, P. (2006). Out of this world: Deleuze and the philosophy of creation. Verso.

Hughes, J. (1997). Lines of flight. Sheffield Academic Press.

Hunt, T. (2024, March 26). What is “process philosophy” and who is Alfred North Whitehead? Medium. Link

Kemper, J. (2024). Deep Time and Microtime: Anthropocene Temporalities and Silicon Valley’s Longtermist Scope. Theory, Culture & Society, 41(6), 21–36. https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764241240662

Lapoujade, D. (2017). Aberrant Movements: The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. MIT Press.

Lettow, S., & Nessel, S. (2022). Ecologies of Gender: Contemporary Nature Relations and the Nonhuman Turn. Routledge.

Massumi, B. (2014). What Animals Teach Us about Politics. Duke University Press.

May-Hobbs, M. (2023, October 23). Henri Bergson’s Philosophy: What is the Importance of Memory? TheCollector. Link

Montag, W. & Stolze, T. (eds) (2008). The New Spinoza. University of Minnesota Press.

Nail, T. (2020). Marx in Motion: A New Materialist Marxism. Oxford University Press, USA.

Nail, T. (2023). Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism. Edinburgh University Press.

Nail, T. (2021). Theory of the Earth. Stanford University Press.

Nail, T. (2021). Theory of the Object. Edinburgh University Press.

Neven, H., Zalcman, A., Read, P., Kosik, K. S., van der Molen, T., Bouwmeester, D., Bodnia, E., Turin, L., & Koch, C. (2024). Testing the Conjecture That Quantum Processes Create Conscious Experience. Entropy (Basel), 26(6), 460. https://doi.org/10.3390/e26060460

Nielsen, T. H. (2024). The Dynamics of Disease: Toward a Processual Theory of Health. The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine, 49(3), 271–282. https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhae014

Robert Mesle. C. (2008). Process-Relational Philosophy. Templeton Press.

Rovelli, Carlo (2020). Helgoland. Penguin.

Schönher, M. (2019). Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy of Nature: System and Method in What is Philosophy. Theory, Culture & Society, 026327641882095. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418820954

Shaviro, S. (2014). The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Posthumanities.

Sölch D. Wheeler and Whitehead: Process Biology and Process Philosophy in the Early Twentieth Century. J Hist Ideas. 2016 Jul;77(3):489-507. doi: 10.1353/jhi.2016.0021. PMID: 27477347.

1. There are some astonishing works of literature that do this. Think James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is, and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity's Rainbow. Note also that most of the major works of process philosophy listed below have been criticised for being dense, layered with complex language, difficult to read and understand.

2. It’s probably also worthwhile remembering that continental philosophers are not the only ones who like obtuse language and jargon. Just think about what you had to learn to become a health professional! All those latin words for body parts, complicated physiological processes and technical terms. Process philosophy language is only hard because it’s unfamiliar. Reading more of it — like studying the Krebb’s cycle or revising the origins and insertions of adductor longus — can really help.