Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (S U N Y Series in Philosophy)

318 Pages·2007·1.24 MB·English

by  David Ray Griffin

WHITEHEAD’S
R A D I C A L LY
D I F F E R E N T
P O S T M O D E R N
P H I L O S O P H Y
AN ARGUMENT FOR ITS CONTEMPORARY RELEVANCE
DAVID RAY GRIFFIN
Whitehead’s Radically Different
Postmodern Philosophy
SUNY series in Philosophy
George R. Lucas Jr., editor
Whitehead’s Radically Different
Postmodern Philosophy
An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance
David Ray Griffin
(cid:2)
STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS
Cover photo: black and white photograph / portrait of Alfred North Whitehead
courtesy of the Center for Process Studies, Claremont, CA.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Griffin, David Ray, 1939–
Whitehead’s radically different postmodern philosophy : an argument
for its contemporary relevance / David Ray Griffin.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978–0–7914–7049–7 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. Whitehead, Alfred North, 1861–1947. 2. Postmodernism.
3. Process philosophy. I. Title
B1674.W354G75 2007
192—dc22
2006017525
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
INTRODUCTION vii
ABBREVIATIONS xi
PART1. WHITEHEAD’S PHILOSOPHY AS POSTMODERN
1. Whitehead’s Philosophy as Postmodern Philosophy 3
2. Whitehead’s Philosophy and the Enlightenment 15
PART2. WHITEHEAD ON CONSCIOUSNESS, ECOLOGY,
TRUTH, TIME, AND ETHICS
3. Consciousness as a Subjective Form: Interactionism without Dualism 51
4. Whitehead’s Deeply Ecological Worldview:
Egalitarianism without Irrelevance 70
5. Truth as Correspondence, Knowledge as Dialogical:
Pluralism without Relativism 86
6. Time in Physics and the Time of Our Lives:
Overcoming Misplaced Concreteness 106
7. Whitehead and the Crisis in Moral Theory:
Theistic Ethics without Heteronomy 139
v
vi Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy
PART3. THE COHERENCE OF WHITEHEADIAN THEISM
8. Relativity Physics and Whiteheadian Theism:
Overcoming the Apparent Conflicts 166
9. Whiteheadian Theism: A Response to Robert Neville’s Critique 186
APPENDIX: Whitehead’s Subjectivist Principle:
From Descartes to Panexperientialism 215
NOTES 242
BIBLIOGRAPHY 276
INDEX 297
Introduction
When thinkers started using the term postmodern with some regularity in the
1960s and 1970s, its meaning was such that its application to the philosophy
of Alfred North Whitehead was eminently appropriate. In those days, in fact,
the idea of “postmodern thought” was associated with Whitehead more often
than not.
In later decades, however, this term came to be used with a radically differ-
ent meaning, one that made Whiteheadian philosophy seem more an opponent
than an exemplification of postmodernism. For example, in an essay entitled
“Postmodernism” in the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Bernd Magnus, an
expert on Nietzsche, says that postmodernism is characterized by three central
concepts: ‘anti-realism,’ ‘opposition to transcendental arguments and transcen-
dental standpoints,’ and ‘rejection of truth as correspondence to reality.’
Whitehead, far from exemplifying any of these positions, explicitly argues against
them (although this is true in relation to the second one only under some of the
possible meanings of the word transcendental). Many philosophers, accordingly,
would find the use of the term postmodern to characterize Whitehead’s philoso-
phy misleading or even illegitimate.
To draw that conclusion, however, is to commit the common fallacy of
equating a genus with one of its species. This fallacy is, to be sure, quite com-
monly committed. For example, evolutionism is widely equated with the neo-
Darwinian theory of evolution; theism is widely equated with traditional theism;
and mind-body interactionism is widely equated with dualistic interactionism.
The fact that the fallacy is widely committed does not, however, remove its falla-
cious nature and its possible perniciousness.
The equation of a genus with one of its species can be pernicious because if
that species is widely regarded as deeply problematic, those problems will be
used to reject the genus as such. Christian fundamentalists, for example, com-
monly use problems in neo-Darwinism as a basis for arguing that evolutionism as
such should be rejected; atheists use problems in traditional theism, such as its
insoluble problem of evil, as a basis for rejecting theism of every type; and mate-
rialist identists, who regard the mind as identical with the brain, use problems in
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viii Whitehead’s Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy
dualistic interactionism as the basis for rejecting mind-brain interactionism alto-
gether. These fallacious rejections are especially pernicious if it is the case, as I
believe, that a true account of the nature of reality would involve a species of
evolutionism, a species of theism, and a species of mind-brain interactionism.
In a similar way, the fallacious equation of postmodernism as such with the
species of postmodernism that became prevalent in the 1980s and 1990s has led
many thinkers to argue, from the fact that that form of postmodernism is deeply
problematic (being even self-stultifying), that postmodernism as such should be
left behind. But that attitude, besides being fallacious, is also pernicious if it is
the case, as I believe, that the best way to overcome the incoherence and irrele-
vance of mainstream modern philosophies is by means of an approach that is
most accurately termed “postmodern,” even though it disagrees radically with
many of the central theses widely thought to be inextricably connected with
that term.
This radical disagreement about what kind of approach is most deserving of
the term ‘postmodern’ is intimately related to the question of which dimensions
of distinctively modernphilosophy need to be transcended. Whitehead had very
definite ideas about this question and developed his philosophy as a solution to
some very basic ontological and epistemological premises that are distinctive to
the “modern worldview.” He believed there was no hope for significant progress
in philosophy apart from a rejection of those premises. His philosophy is properly
called “postmodern” insofar as it provides a reasoned critique of, and alternative
to, those premises while retaining the clear advances associated with modernity
(rather than returning to a premodern worldview).
Besides being fallacious and pernicious, the contention that Whitehead’s
philosophy cannot legitimately be called “postmodern” is possibly even self-con-
tradictory. That is, this contention seems to entail the claim that Whitehead’s
philosophy conflicts with the essence of postmodernism—even though one of
the features of the kind of postmodernism in question is the rejection of essen-
tialist thinking.
Be that as it may, I believe that the characterization of Whitehead’s philos-
ophy as postmodern helps bring out important dimensions of his philosophy that
would otherwise be missed or at least underemphasized. I also suspect that
Whitehead’s philosophy, in addition to being one species or version of postmod-
ernism, is the superior species in the sense of best dealing with the commonly
recognized problems created by distinctively modern philosophy. I will not, how-
ever, engage in the kind of comparative analysis that such an argument will
require. I will simply show that Whitehead’s philosophy can in fact deal with a
wide range of those problems. I leave to others the issue of whether there is
another kind of postmodernism that can do a better or at least comparable job.
The first part of this book looks at Whitehead’s philosophy from this point
of view. The use of ‘postmodern’ to describe Whitehead’s philosophy is explored
Introduction ix
most fully in chapter 1. The second chapter looks at the closely related issue of
the relation of Whitehead’s philosophy to the movement commonly known as
“the enlightenment.”
The second part of the book examines five issues that have been widely rec-
ognized as deeply problematic for modern philosophy. The first four problems
have resulted from one of the distinctive premises of modern thought, namely,
the idea that the most elementary units of the world are what Whitehead calls
“vacuous actualities”—meaning entities that are fully actual and yet wholly
devoid of experience. These four problems are (1) the inability to explain (apart
from the supernaturalism presupposed by Descartes) the existence of conscious
experience and its capacity to interact with the physical world, including the
brain; (2) the existence of an antiecological worldview, in which “nature” is
regarded as devoid of intrinsic value; (3) the inability to articulate our presuppo-
sition that truth means “correspondence”; and (4) the inability to reconcile time
as we experience it with the only kind of time that can exist in the world studied
by physicists, if that world is indeed comprised of vacuous actualities (as both
dualists and materialists assume). I argue that Whitehead’s panexperientialism,
arguably the most fundamental of his postmodern doctrines, provides the basis
for solving all four of these problems.
The fifth problem, the current crisis in moral theory, is shown to have
resulted primarily from taking the modern insistence that ethics cannot be het-
eronomous—that is, based on an appeal to authority—to entail that it must be
independent of theism. I show that Whitehead’s philosophy, especially his ver-
sion of theism, can, while fully rejecting all appeals to authority, overcome the
central problems responsible for the current crisis in moral theory.
In the third part of the book, I defend Whitehead’s version of theism, often
called “panentheism,” which is another of his postmodern doctrines (being an
alternative to the three modern possibilities of supernaturalistic theism, panthe-
ism, and atheism). I defend this panentheism against two kinds of criticism.
Chapter 8 argues that, contrary to widespread belief, special relativity physics
creates no difficulties for Whitehead’s temporalistic theism or even the more
fully temporalistic theism of Charles Hartshorne. Chapter 9 defends
Whiteheadian theism against the “challenge to process theism” issued by Robert
Neville, who has argued that Whitehead’s position could be made more ade-
quate and coherent by replacing Whitehead’s doctrine of God with a radically
different doctrine.
The appendix examines in some detail Whitehead’s treatment of the major
methodological move—the “subjectivist turn”—made by the archetypal modern
philosopher, René Descartes. Whitehead argued that if Descartes, whose name
is virtually synonymous with ontological dualism and its notorious mind-body
problem, had carried his subjectivist turn to its logical conclusion, he would
have been led to panexperientialism, in which this problem does not arise.