Abstract In this essay, I reconsider Alfred North Whitehead's underexplored human exceptionalism as a productive feature of process ethics, rather than a glitch. Utilizing Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's notion of “conceptual personae” as thought provocations toward alternate futures, I revisit Whitehead's claim that in “the human”—as distinct from “the animal”—“the Rubicon has been crossed” (MT 27). At one level, Whitehead's repetition of anthropocentrism's founding gesture of defining the human over and against the animal would severely curb the usefulness of process metaphysics to challenge ubiquitous harms to animals and the environment. But I argue that a careful reading of Whitehead's concept of “Reason,” when considered alongside the “conceptual personae” of the “animal body” as well as the individual animals through which Whitehead defines Reason, reworks the exceptional human as expressed most fully through its attempts at harm reduction and expansive planetary flourishing.
Brianne Donaldson (Thu,) studied this question.