Isabelle Stengers

Isabelle Stengers learned her metaphysics in a laboratory. Trained as a chemist in Brussels, she worked on the research team of Ilya Prigogine in the years when non-equilibrium thermodynamics was dismantling physics’ oldest prejudice — that time’s arrow is an illusion, a smudge our limited eyes put on reversible laws. Prigogine’s dissipative structures — systems far from equilibrium that hold themselves together by exchanging energy with their surroundings — showed order arising out of chaos, irreversibly, in time, and not as an anomaly but as how nature builds, life included. Their books together, Order Out of Chaos above all, carried the news to a wide public. Prigogine brought the science; Stengers brought the question underneath it: if nature is genuinely in the making, what happens to a science that claimed to describe a finished world from outside?

Readers of this blog have met an unfinished universe before — James willed his way to it. Stengers got there through thermodynamics, and what she took from the laboratory was not a doctrine but a question about the practices themselves. Chemistry had taught her what a practice is from inside: its own obligations, its own constraints, its own way of being answerable. Philosophy, she found, mostly studied practices from a chair none of them occupied. The question that runs through everything she has written since is how practices — scientific, political, artistic, healing — can coexist when no such chair exists.

Her seven-volume answer is called Cosmopolitics, and the name picks a deliberate fight. Cosmopolitanism dreams of one world order grounded in shared humanity — the constitution, in effect, already written. Cosmopolitics denies that the cosmos is given in advance: it is not the container the practices sit in but what would have to be constructed for them to hold together, slowly, with no transcendent vantage to arbitrate. And her refusal of the referee’s chair cuts deeper than tolerance — tolerance, she notes, is just the referee smiling, permission issued from the very seat that was supposed to be empty. What she proposes instead is an ecology of practices, and the ecology is meant literally: practices occupy niches, compete, cooperate, and transform one another’s environments; the philosopher’s work is to study how they present themselves to one another, not to grade them from above.

Two of her concepts do the fine work. Reciprocal capture names the good case: conflicting practices that develop a relation in which each is changed by the other and both remain distinct — not compromise, not conversion, but mutual transformation without merger. And the idiot, a figure she borrows from Deleuze, guards the process: the one who slows down the consensus, who cannot argue the urgent question everyone treats as self-evident but insists — without being able to say what it is — that “there is something more important.” Not stupidity; a principled brake on the rush to agreement, kept inside the room.

The process flavour of all this is no accident. In 2002 she published the book of a thirty-year engagement, Thinking with Whitehead, and is widely credited with returning Whitehead to serious philosophical reading after decades of neglect. Her Whitehead is a constructivist — speculative philosophy as the free and wild creation of concepts, built to civilise the abstractions modern thought inherits, never a system claiming completeness; she even takes his God seriously, as a constraint the construction needs rather than an embarrassment to excise. The chemist who had watched order grow out of chaos found the metaphysician who had built becoming into the world’s furniture. She has been thinking with him, on her own terms, ever since.

Where does she stop? She would refuse the question’s premise — arriving is not the point. But the late work says where the stakes are: catastrophe. Infernal alternatives, fast science, a planet in trouble — the moment when the single urgent answer bids hardest for the whole field and slowing down looks like betrayal. Exactly there she plants the idiot. Her philosophy practices what it describes: situated, obligated, slow, one practice among the many it studies. In a century rushing to verdicts, hers is a wager that the cosmos is still under construction — and that holding the many together, without a referee, is the construction site itself.

This post is part of the conversations series. See also the reference entry on Isabelle Stengers.

Photo: UX Indonesia / Unsplash