A Whiteheadian Chaosmos?

Abstract

The main purpose of this chapter is to establish a fundamental difference between the speculative systems of Deleuze and Whitehead by way of the distinction between a cosmology and a chaosmology. At its most simplistic, the difference in play is that between a cosmos in which order is imposed on a primordial chaos ‘from outside’, or transcendently (as when Form is imposed on matter by the Platonic demiurge, or harmony established a priori by the Leibnizean deity), and a chaosmos in which order is generated ‘from within’, by a wholly immanent process of self-organization. In these very general terms, perhaps the closest approximation to a chaosmology among Whiteheadian thinkers is to be found in Donald Sherburne’s vision of ‘a Whitehead decentered … a Whitehead without God ... a neo-Whiteheadian naturalism’. From this perspective, as from Deleuze’s, ‘there is no one overarching center of value, meaning and order’; rather, ‘patterns of meaning and order emerge gradually, fitfully, and unevenly from [a] churning multiplicity of value centers’ (Sherburne, 1986, pp. 83, 92). Thus — or so it would seem — the term ‘chaosmology’ is simply a fancy neologism for speculative naturalism, for a cosmological system which lacks a God.