Griffin's radically different postmodern philosophy

As avid readers of my customer reviews should know by now, I have a love-hate relationship with process philosophy (or is it theology?). "Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy" is yet another good introduction to the subject, penned by David Ray Griffin. The author is the unofficial leading light of current process philosophy, the school of thought founded by Alfred North Whitehead and further developed by Charles Hartshorne.

This book contains 10 essays by Griffin on various aspects of Whitehead's philosophy. It deals with consciousness, ecology, morality, the Enlightenment project, quantum physics, etc. Since Griffin often reinterprets Whitehead in the light of Hartshorne, the book is - strictly speaking - an exposition of Griffin's own philosophy, but since the author is the most well-known process philosopher today, this doesn't really matter if what you're seeking is a contemporary application of Whitehead's ideas (only one essay is technical).

I'm fascinated by process philosophy for several reasons. This school of thought has a strong evangelistic fervour, and resembles a political-social movement rather than a group of ivory tower philosophers. These people are out in force to convert *you* to their brand of philosophy, and since most of them claim to be Christian, you might get a radical-liberal version of Jesus as part of the bargain, too. Indeed, people who have read Whitehead often seem to have had some kind of "conversion experiences" - surely an unusual response to a modern philosopher (or any philosopher). Ayn Rand doesn't count.

I don't socialize with the process community, but I think I know why process philosophy/theology has such a mesmerizing effect on some people. In contrast to most other 20th century philosophers, Whitehead actually claimed to have *the* answers to all metaphysical questions. Forget about Wittgenstein, Heidegger and "official" postmodernism. Whitehead is also an all-knowing liberal alternative to Christian fundamentalism, in contrast to the more nebulous and mushy musings of other liberal theologians. I admit that this guy was pretty smart! Many of his solutions to various vexing problems of philosophy do make a lot of sense. Had I picked up this book ten or fifteen years ago, I might have been mesmerized by The Process myself - this is probably as close as you can get to what I "wanted to believe" at the time. Well, sort of.

Whitehead's philosophy might be the closest thing a sceptic or naturalist might ever get to "religion", without actually becoming religious. While this may not be a fair description of why some Christians feel attracted to it, it does explain my own fascination.

However, reading "Whitehead's radically different postmodern philosophy", I also sensed certain shortcomings and problems. While Griffin's panexperientialism is a clever attempt to solve the mind-body problem without appeals to supernaturalist dualism, I'm not so sure whether it works. Indeed, Griffin sounds dualist at several points in his argument. Thus, God gives every "occasion of experience" an "initial aim", but if this input from the outside is needed to get the process going, what's the real difference with dualism? It also turns out that the process itself is amoral, so the only objective basis for ethics and aesthetics is for the "occasions of experience" to "prehend" a kind of quasi-Platonic forms in the mind of God. I know that Griffin wants to be called "interactionist" rather than "dualist", but I think most people will see this as a kind of dualism anyway.

Griffin's panexperientialism is based on the notion that everything that exists is an "occasion of experience". Consciousness has arisen through a gradual evolutionary process from "experience", a broader category. Thus, atoms and molecules have a very primitive form of experience, plants have somewhat more, animals even more and humans most of all. At a certain point, "consciousness" in the stricter sense arises out of "experience". However, even Griffin himself concedes that it could be difficult to grasp how human consciousness can emerge from more primitive forms of experience through a process that's purely quantitative. He argues at length that most of our experience is non-sensory, but all Griffin's examples of non-sensory perception are advanced, not primitive. The ability to "prehend" objectively valid moral principles in the mind of God is surely an advanced trait, and so are the phenomena studied by parapsychology, such as telepathy and psychokinesis. At one point, Griffin delineates four distinct phases in the evolution of experience, but all of them except the first also strike me as fairly advanced. It's ironic that Griffin doesn't solve the problem by simply postulating more interactionist input from God, but apparently he is unwilling to do so, due to Whitehead's insistence on "naturalistic theism". That too is strange, since the involution-evolution scheme of Theosophy, Aurobindo and Ken Wilber could be given a naturalistic spin. Why not postulate a naturalistic form of involution as a prelude to the evolution of consciousness?

On one point, Griffin does make Whitehead's philosophy sound more logical and less dualist. While Whitehead looked upon God as a single, super-occasion of experience (the Mother of All Monads, to crack a joke), Hartshorne viewed God as a "personally ordered society", a kind of cosmic compound individual encompassing all occasions of experience in the entire universe. Griffin sides with Hartshorne against Whitehead. However, a pesky philosophy student might ask where this god originally came from? All other personally ordered societies have evolved at some point in time. God, by contrast, seems to be eternal. (This objection doesn't seem to apply to Whitehead's view of God, since an unchanging super-monad could conceivably be prior to the constantly changing lesser monads making up the cosmos.) Since Hartshorne's and Griffin's god didn't evolve, why not? One can also ask a more provocative question: according to process philosophy, God is affected by the world, while not being entirely able to control its direction. What if the world turns evil? Shouldn't the compound individual known as God also turn evil, if the "occasions of experience" which constitute him do so? Griffin might respond that God is stronger, but this is by no means clear.

This brings me to my final objection to process philosophy/theology: its curious theodicy. This question is mentioned only in passing in this particular book, but elsewhere Griffin sees this as almost the central point of Whitehead's and Hartshorne's systems. The god of process thought is all-good, but he is not omnipotent. In this way, process theologians have "solved" the issue of how evil can co-exist with a good God. But while Griffin might see this as a decisive advantage over other worldviews, I think this is really the Achilles heel of the entire philosophy. Why *don't* most religious people embrace the radically different postmodern philosophy of Whitehead & Co? To use Griffin's own terminology, isn't it a "hard-core common sense" notion that good is better than evil and suffering? Isn't it therefore also a hard-core common sense notion that a worldview which promises that evil will be vanquished, is better than one which says the opposite? According to process philosophy, evil *cannot* be vanquished, and might even emerge victorious! And since Process God isn't omnipotent, he can't do anything to stop such an outcome.

Somebody might protest at this point, saying that process philosophy is metaphysically sound. But people usually don't become religious in order to get the brightest metaphysical solutions to various theological problems. They become religious since religion seems to make life inherently meaningful. I don't think it's a coincidence that religions that promise total deliverance from evil have a mass appeal. Perhaps we could see this as another non-sensory insight, an existential insight perhaps? Put differently, why should anyone want to worship a god that isn't both all-good and all-powerful, not even potentially all-powerful? Process philosophy is too mired in its splendid metaphysics. It doesn't give an existentially satisfying answer to the problem of evil.

Even apart from this, it's difficult to take process thinking seriously at this point. God should at least be as powerful as any man! Indeed a god who is a compound individual encompassing all that is, should be vastly more powerful than all humans taken together. Even if Hartshorne's god isn't literally omnipotent (perhaps it can't stop *me* from hitting an innocent bug this very second), one still wonders why the dominant monad in the universe can't get rid of an evil person by an interactionist lightning bolt? On this point, the god of process theology isn't really a god at all, but simply a kind of pantheistic-deistic world soul which happens to be the basis for good behaviour due to some Schopenhauerian interconnectedness of All That Is, but which cannot really *do* anything. Somehow, this doesn't sound very different from the quasi-Buddhist element in the local humanist association...

To repeat: "Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy" by David Ray Griffin isn't a bad book by any means. And yes, Griffin's radically different postmodern philosophy is interesting. But does it really unsnarl the world-knot? When all is said and done, this reviewer remains sceptical.