[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] David Ray Griffin's Constructive Postmodernism

Terry W. Colvin fortean1 at mindspring.com
Fri May 21 02:56:12 UTC 2004


Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 16:06:14 -0700
From: "T. Peter Park" <tpeterpark at erols.com>
  To: forteana at yahoogroups.com
Subj: FWD (forteana) David Ray Griffin's Constructive Postmodernism


            DAVID RAY GRIFFIN'S CONSTRUCTIVE POSTMODERNISM

            David Ray Griffin, an American Whiteheadian philosopher and 
liberal Protestant theologian, has developed a "constructive 
postmodernist" philosophy rather different from the "postmodernism" of 
Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Richard Rorty, 
Stanley Fish, and their followers. Griffin, a Claremont Graduate 
University philosophy professor, is a "process philosopher" and follower 
of Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) who calls himself a 
"postmodernist" and his world-view a form of "postmodernism." A 
theologian as well as a philosopher, Griffin is strongly sympathetic to 
parapsychology--the scientific study of extra-sensory perception, 
ghosts, apparitions, out-of-the-body and near-death experiences, and 
seeming communications by the dead--and hopes to rehabilitate a belief 
in God, the soul, absolute moral values, free will, miral 
responsibility, and life after death for our time through his 
"constructive postmodernism" with the aid of parapsychology.

Griffin is the Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the School of 
Theology at Claremont, Executive Director of the Center for Process 
Studies, and founding president of the Center for a Postmodern World in 
Santa Barbara. He is also the Editor of the "SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought.." Griffin's books on philosophy, theology, and 
science & religion include _The Reenchantment of Science: Postmodern 
Proposals_ (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988), _God and 
Religion in the Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology_ 
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989), _Parapsychology, 
Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration_ (Albany, NY: 
State University of New York Press, 1997),  _God, Power, and Evil: A 
Process Theodicy_(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976),_A Process 
Christology_(Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973),_Unsnarling the 
World-Knot: Consciousness, Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem_ (Berkeley 
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998), and _Religion 
and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts_ (Albany, NY: State 
University of New York Press, 2000). _God and Religion in the Postmodern 
World_ (1989),_Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality_(1997), and 
_Religion and Scientific Naturalism _(2000) are part of Griffin's SUNY 
Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought.

            In the "Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought" at the beginning of his _God and Religion in the 
Postmodern World: Essays in Postmodern Theology_ (SUNY Press, 1989), 
Griffin distinguishes between "deconstructive" or "eliminative" 
postmodernism, which he also calls "ultramodernism," versus 
"constructive" or "revisionary" postmodernism. Griffin begins by noting 
that "the rapid spread of the term postmodernism in recent years 
witnesses to a growing dissatisfaction with modernity," to "an 
increasing sense that the modern age not only had a beginning but can 
have an end as well,"and to a "growing sense" that "we can and should 
leave modernity behind--in fact, that we _must_ if we are to avoid 
destroying ourselves and most of the life on our planet" (David Ray 
Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern 
Thought," in Griffin, _God and Religion in the Postmodern World_, SUNY 
Press, 1989, p. ix). He observes that "a new respect for the wisdom of 
traditional societies is growing as we realize that they have endured 
for thousands of years" while "the existence of modern society for even 
another century seems doubtful." Similarly, modernism_ as a worldview is 
less and less seen as The Final Truth, in comparison with which all 
divergent worldviews are automatically regarded as 'superstitious.'" The 
"modern worldview," Griffin observes, is now "increasingly relativized 
to the status of one among many, useful for some purposes, inadequate 
for others" (Griffin,"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought,"p. ix).

.           Griffin also observes that "there have been antimodern 
movements before, beginning perhaps near the onset of the nineteenth 
century with the Romantics and the Luddites"(Griffin,"Introduction to 
SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought,"p. ix). However, "the 
rapidity with which the term _postmodern_ has become widespread in our 
time suggests that the antimodern sentiment is more extensive and 
intense than before." It also "includes the sense that modernity can be 
successfully overcome only by going beyond it, not by attempting to 
return to a premodern form of existence." The term _postmodernity_, he 
feels, refers to "a diffuse sentiment rather than to any set of 
doctrines," to the "sentiment that humanity can and must go beyond the 
modern" (Griffin,"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern 
Thought,"pp. ix-x). Beyond "connoting this sentiment," Griffin finds 
that "the term postmodern is used in a confusing variety of ways, some 
of them contradictory to others." In "artistic and literary circles," 
for instance, "postmodernity" suggests this "general sentiment" but 
"also involves a specific reaction against 'modernism' in the narrow 
sense of a movement in artistic-literary circles in the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth centuries"--in other words, to a reaction against 
doing any more imitations and rehashes of Proust, Joyce, Eliot, Pound, 
Yeats, Kafka, Pirandello, Beckett, Picasso, Braque, Dalí, Matisse, 
Stravinsky, Schönberg, and Hindemith."Postmodern architecture," again, 
is "very different from postmodern literary 
criticism"(Griffin,"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive 
Postmodern Thought,"p. x).

            In "some circles," Griffin continues, "the term_ postmodern_ 
is used in reference to that potpourri of ideas and systems sometimes 
called _new age metaphysics_, although many of these ideas and systems 
are more premodern than postmodern." Then, he adds, "even in 
philosophical and theological circles" in academia, "the term 
_postmodern_ refers to two quite different positions, one of which is 
reflected in this series" (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in 
Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x). Both positions seek to 
"transcend both _modernism_ in the sense of the worldview that has 
developed out of the seventeenth century 
Galilean-Cartesian-Baconian-Newtonian science, and _modernity_ in the 
sense of the world order that both conditioned and was conditioned by 
this world-view." However, "the two positions seek to transcend the 
modern in different ways." (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in 
Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x).

            "Closely related to literary-artistic postmodernism," 
Griffin finds a "philosophical postmodernism inspired variously by 
pragmatism, physicalism, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and 
Jacques Derrida and other recent French thinkers." This "can be called 
__deconstructive_ or _eliminative postmodernism._ Griffin feels that it 
"overcomes the modern worldview through an anti-worldview." It 
"deconstructs or eliminates the ingredients necessary for a worldview, 
such as God, self, purpose, meaning, a real world, and truth as 
correspondence." While it is "motivated in some cases by the ethical 
concern to forestall totalitarianism," Griffin feels that "this type of 
postmodern thought issues in relativism, even nihilism." It indeed 
"could also be called _ultramodernism_, in that its eliminations result 
from carrying modern premises to their logical conclusions" (Griffin, 
"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. 
x).  This "ultramodernism," as Griffin calls it, is of course the 
"postmodernism" associated with figures like Michel Foucault, Jacques 
Derrida, Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and 
Richard Rorty. In a somewhat revised version of this "Introduction" in 
his _Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts_ (SUNY 
Press, 2000), Griffin derives "deconstructive" or "eliminative" 
postmodernism from the thought of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and "a 
cluster of French thinkers--including Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, 
Gilles Deleuze, and Julie Kristéva" (p. x).

             By contrast, the "postmodernism" of Griffin's "SUNY Series 
in Constrictive Postmodern Thought" is a "_constructive_ or 
_revisionary_" postmodernism. It "seeks to overcome the modern worldview 
not by eliminating the possibility of worldviews as such," but rather by 
"constructing a postmodern worldview through a revision of modern 
premises and traditional concepts." It "involves a new unity of 
scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions." It "rejects 
not science as such but only that scientism in which the data of the 
modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the 
construction of our worldview" (Griffin, "Introduction to SUNY Series in 
Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. x).

           Such "constructive activity" is "not limited to a revised 
worldview," but is "equally concerned with a postmodern world that will 
support and be supported by the new worldview" (Griffin, "Introduction 
to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," pp. x-xi). A 
"postmodern world,' Griffin feels, will "involve postmodern persons, 
with a postmodern spirituality," and also a "postmodern society, 
ultimately a postmodern global order." Going beyond the "modern world" 
involves "transcending its individualism, anthropocentrism, patriarchy, 
mechanization, economism, consumerism, nationalism, and militarism." 
Griffin believes that the "constructive postmodern thought" he advocates 
"provides support for the ecology, peace, feminist, and other 
emancipatory movements of our time," but adds that "the inclusive 
emancipation must be from modernity itself." Griffin adds that the "term 
_postmodern_, however, by contrast with _premodern_, emphasizes that the 
modern world has produced unparalleled advances that must not be lost in 
a general revulsion against its negative features" (Griffin, 
"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. 
xi). Thus, Griffin does not want to restore the "good old days" of the 
feudal Middle Ages, Puritan New England, or the ante-bellum Southern 
plantation, to drive women back to the kitchen, Blacks back to the 
cotton-fields, or Jews back to the ghetto, to force women to 
wear_chadors_ and Jews to wear yellow Stars of David, or to bring back 
witch-burning and the Holy Inquisition! Despite his critique of 
"modernity," Griffin does not want to do away with democracy, 
penicillin, smallpox vaccination, birth control, telephones, and 
computers, or return the Bourbon, Habsburg, and Romanov dynasties to 
their thrones!

             Griffin admits that from the viewpoint of the 
"deconstructive postmodernists" like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, 
Jean-François Lyotard, and Richard Rorty,his "constructive 
postmodernism" is "still hopelessly wedded to outdated concepts" like 
God, soul, truth, meaning, and purpose, "because it wishes to salvage a 
positive meaning not only for the notions of the human self, historical 
meaning, and truth as correspondence, which were central to modernity, 
but also for premodern notions of a divine reality, cosmic meaning, and 
an enchanted nature." From the viewpoint of its "advocates," however, 
Griffin sees his "revisionary postmodernism" as "not only more adequate 
to our experience" than the deconstructive postmodernism of Derrida, 
Baudrillard, and Rorty, "but also more genuinely postmodern." Griffin's 
constructive postmodernism "does not simply carry the premises of 
modernity through to their logical conclusions" like the followers of 
"but criticizes and revises those premises." Through its "return to 
organicism" and its "acceptance of nonsensory perception," Griffin's 
constructive postmodernism "opens itself to the recovery of truths and 
values from various forms of premodern thought and practice that had 
been dogmatically rejected by modernity." It "involves a creative 
synthesis of modern and premodern truths and values"(Griffin, 
"Introduction to SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought," p. xi).


-- 
"Only a zit on the wart on the heinie of progress." Copyright 1992, Frank Rice


Terry W. Colvin, Sierra Vista, Arizona (USA) < fortean1 at mindspring.com >
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