The Invention of a Method

A powerful proposition runs throughout Process and Reality: speculative philosophy is essentially a method. This proposition, despite its centrality, is announced explicitly only once, in the opening sentences of the book, at the start of the chapter entitled ‘Speculative Philosophy’.

This course of lectures is designed as an essay in Speculative Philosophy. Its first task must be to define ‘speculative philosophy’, and to defend it as a method productive of important knowledge. (PR, 3)

The French translators of Process and Reality chose to translate ‘important knowledge’ as ‘wide-ranging knowledge’ [savoir de grande portée]. This choice does not seem justified, even if it does respond to a legitimate concern about bringing to light particular aspects of knowledge. It overlooks the fact that the term ‘importance’ is a technical concept in Process and Reality and that Whitehead dedicates an entire chapter to it in Modes of Thought. ‘Important knowledge’, of course, is knowledge possessed with extension, and so might indeed be wide-ranging. This, however, is a consequence of its importance and not its essential characteristic.

In this chapter, speculative thought appears not as a merely introductory or preparatory question but is identified as the very object of the book. Whitehead announces this clearly by his introducing Process and Reality as an ‘essay in Speculative Philosophy’. The stakes, then, are clear at first sight, and it is in the literality of what he says that the meaning and reason can be found for the task that takes him to the heart of a group of questions traditionally reserved for metaphysics.