Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Chapter One A Culture of Thought – The Bifurcation of Nature
- Chapter Two Introducing Whitehead's Philosophy – The Lure of Whitehead
- Chapter Three ‘A Thorough-Going Realism’ – Whitehead On Cause and Conformation
- Chapter Four The Value of Existence
- Chapter Five Societies, the Social and Subjectivity
- Chapter Six Language and the Body – From Signification to Symbolism
- Chapter Seven This Nature Which Is Not One
- Chapter Eight Capitalism, Process and Abstraction
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter Four - The Value of Existence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Chapter One A Culture of Thought – The Bifurcation of Nature
- Chapter Two Introducing Whitehead's Philosophy – The Lure of Whitehead
- Chapter Three ‘A Thorough-Going Realism’ – Whitehead On Cause and Conformation
- Chapter Four The Value of Existence
- Chapter Five Societies, the Social and Subjectivity
- Chapter Six Language and the Body – From Signification to Symbolism
- Chapter Seven This Nature Which Is Not One
- Chapter Eight Capitalism, Process and Abstraction
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The question of the value of value is one which may be familiar to social theorists as deriving from Nietzsche and from more recent reappraisals of his work. The problem of value, however, is stubbornly embedded in the presumptions and assumptions of social theory. Most students of the subject will, at some point, be led through the distinction between positivism (with its emphasis on facts) and interpretivism (with its emphasis on meaning and value) as having, for many years, offered the two major approaches to studying and conceiving of the social world. As seen in the previous chapter, Critical Realism, in many respects, identified itself as an attempt to synthesize these into a more complete account of the world and the social world. There is something neat about such a division of both the history and the practice of social theory which then enables more “modern” approaches (such as postmodernism, feminism, postcolonial theory, queer theory etc.) to position themselves both within and as reactions to these conceptual legacies. The position of Whitehead would be to insist that what is needed is a thorough examination of the manner and extent of the very division between fact and value. What was it that led to this division and how far does its reach still extend to, and inhabit, our contemporary concepts? Only then will it be possible to refine the conceptual strategies which still tacitly support this dichotomy.
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- Chapter
- Information
- A. N. Whitehead and Social TheoryTracing a Culture of Thought, pp. 63 - 78Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2011