The power of reason is that it is experienced (and a defense of Whitehead's category of reversion)

Since thinking happens in and as experience, what then becomes of the empirical/rational divide? Is there some part of experience that is empirical, while another part is rational?

I've recently returned to Nathan Brown's Rationalist Empiricism, which takes up examples of that titular philosophical practice under the heading "speculative critique." He defines the speculative in opposition to the transcendental; for the latter guarantees the conditions of experience it articulates, whereas the former relinquishes any such ground and instead responds to what the rational in experience demands that it think.

"By 'rationalist' I mean to denote a philosophical orientation deploying the power of reason to push thought beyond the limits of experience, to explore what has to be thought according to the internal order and consistency of ideas. By empiricism I refer to a philosophical orientation claiming the genesis of ideas in experience and grounding the determination of what is the case on the consistency of thinking with experiential fact (Brown 3). The "speculative," and I'm following Didier Debaise on Whitehead's method as well as Nathan, is the experience of the necessary connection between ideas, the truth of which bears out in their effects (Debaise, Speculative Empiricism: Revisiting Whitehead, esp. ch.2 "Speculative Method"). Rather than being a separate, non-empirical domain, speculative critique is provoked by other experiences into a rational extension of the empirical, which extension, because it is itself experienced, contributes to the empirical provocation of thinking's critical speculation.

There is a flip side to this methodological distinction, which Mark Hansen, following Didier Debaise, calls the "speculative ban" (Feed-Forward pp.86, 88–89). The becoming of the empirical cannot itself be empirical since it cannot be the object of experience. Mark's "ban" is a prohibition against referring to the speculative concepts describing that genesis in order to account for any particular empirical fact. (More than a methodological proscription, it has a bearing on his argument about the agency of the superject in Whitehead's philosophy of organism.) Eugen Fink similarly names his "pre-phenomenological" processual Absolute that coincides existence the "meontic" or the "pre-ontological" (Sixth Cartesian Meditation). The genesis of the empirical is necessarily non-empirical, as there is no way to experience the becoming of experience, though the speculative positing of this becoming is conditioned by the empirical. Again, the speculative extends from the empirical, remaining within it even as it thinks beyond what experience directly provisions. I am inclined to assert that speculation extends the empirical rather than goes beyond it (which is how "extends from" could be read). Nathan may write of "the extrapolation of reason from and yet beyond experience" (47). Yet the pay-off is that such extrapolations are, in their very occurrence as experienced, folded back into the empirical.

The "power of reason" is a meaningful phrase because thought's movement unfolds as experience. This happens as much in individual conscious feeling as it does in practical effects caused beyond the thread of personality in the wider environment. Think of, for example, Bachelard's concept of phenomenotechnics, whereby a science's rationally ordered theory is rendered phenomenal through technical instruments. The "interruption" of what-is-the-case by what-must-be-the-case itself becomes what-is-the-case (Brown 47). It is important to understand that the interruption of what is given to experience is not that of a neatly ordered reality bestowing a piece of a separate realm of reason unto the subject. On the contrary, Nathan explains:

"For those who are willing to think, formalization is not merely the reduction of the 'messiness' of reality to the 'clean' requisites of a conceptual vocabulary. It is, on the contrary, the mark of recognizing that it is precisely the chaos of contingent encounters and profoundly unassimilable states of affairs that generates forms of rational discernment to which our habits offer no adequate guide, such that they must be rendered in terms that vary from ordinary language" (202). Both Bachelard and Whitehead offer similar accounts of rational thinking's relation to the empirical as a process motivated by the latter's lack of ready-made abstractions. Rationalization, as Whitehead defines it, is the process of consciousness identifying "essential connections within its own conscious area" (Modes of Thought 124). So whereas vivid consciousness connects sensory detail to some real complex of originative data in the world, but which vague totality was occulted by the selection that defines conscious sensation, rationalization recognizes the essential linkages between those two. Or, to recur to Bachelard, the scientist's experimental apparatus perpetually seeks the rational within "the irrationality of the given" (Connaissance Approchée, Book II, ch.9).

It should come as no surprise that speculative critique may also be identified with dialectical criticism. After all, it is Adorno who provides one of the strongest rebuttals to the derogatory use of the word "speculation." Contrary to contemporary usage of speculation as "subjective caprice," to speculate is to engage in a process of thinking that, by way of "logical self-criticism" and "confrontation with the facts," "renounces its own narrowness and in so doing gains objectivity" (from his "Introduction" to The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, pp.4–5). Consider the "dialectical reversal," which is "a reversal of limits" whereby the strengths of a historical situation become "ironclad limits on its future development" or weaknesses become "its secret advantages" (Jameson, Marxism and Form 309). Bachelard's epistemological obstacle exemplifies such a dialectical process. The epistemological obstacle defines what an object can be to the thinker; and it constrains thought through that definition. Surpassing one is a diachronic process whereby the epistemic motor of knowledge production becomes the limiting factor. It is dialectical, first, because it recognizes that an object and the subject that conceives of that object are inseparable moments of a single scene. It incorporates thinking into thinking—a second-order thinking. The epistemological obstacle is dialectical, second, because it identifies in this self-reflexive relational scene of objectivity the kernel of an overcoming whereby epistemic impossibility transforms into a relative perspective. Again, thought's power is in its concreteness, which is to say, in its participation in the world from its origination in experience.

This discussion of reason's place in experience bears on the two interpretations Whitehead presents to explain the origination of alternatives in the conceptual valuation of the world's data: the category of reversion and a primordial actual entity. Whitehead switched from the former to the latter while writing the Gifford lectures that became Process and Reality. He did so in order, at least in part, to side with Hume's empiricism by making the source for ideas entertained by feeling a direct derivation from physically prehended data. When the immediately felt data lack some potential form that nonetheless contributes to the unity of feeling in becoming, then it must derive from that entity whose conceptual valuation is the positive prehension of the infinity of eternal objects (i.e. forms of feeling, potentials for actualization). The example Whitehead uses to introduce reversion is Hume's absent shade of blue: how is it possible that someone can imagine a shade of blue they have never experienced? Hume acknowledges it and moves on, deeming it an insufficient exception to undermine his arguments that everything we think and imagine must come from some element present in our experience of the world. (The absent shade of blue is, along with Déscartes's wax experiment, the topic of Nathan's first chapter in Rationalist Empiricism.)

I prefer the category of reversion, which means siding with the exception to Hume's strict empiricist principle. Beyond personal interpretive preference, however, I thik the category of reversion is actually the more empirical option. I find Whitehead's alternative to be less empirical because it invokes a primordial being that relegates a problem for experience to an extra-metaphysical dictum. (Whitehead describes the positing of a primordial actuality as a matter of interpretation outside the realm of a philosophy's speculative construction.) Reversion, by contrast, keeps the explanation for how experience can derive forms from within its own becoming without them being directly provided by that which originates the novel experience. As I write at the end of the "About" page for this website: "I have seen only so many shades of blue, yet I can imagine the absent shade that would appear to fit between those [presented to me]. Some of what has been decided by the past, and which necessarily conditions the creation of consequent experience, may be reverted to a wider range of possible feeling."

Conceiving of the absent blue shade or any other form we have not observed in the world can be explained not as an intervention from another non-empirical realm but by the operations of experience itself. Thought, or more broadly those components of experience that Whitehead groups together as "intellectual feelings," is the experience of potential not determined to any particular existent, yet which must have been derived from the potential that is determined to particular existents. Thought is extra-empirical only in the sense that its experienced objects are derivative from what is the case rather than directly presented as such. To think is to entertain potentiality with respect to both the contingency of their actualization and the necessity of their relations as ideas.