[extropy-chat] FWD [forteana] David Ray Griffin on "eliminative" vs. "constructive" [...]

[Terry W. Colvin]

FWD [forteana] David Ray Griffin on "eliminative" vs. "constructive"
postmodernism & as religious and cultural philosopher


         Claremont Graduate University Whiteheadian process philosopher
David Ray Griffin calls himself a "postmodernist" and his Whiteheadian
world-view a form of "postmodernism." 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_
(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 worlview 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-Francois 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 Catholic Middle Ages 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 châdors and Jews to wear
yellow Stars of David, or to bring back Jewish ghettoes, witch-burning
and the Holy Inquisition! Despite his critique of "modernity," Griffin
does not want to do away with democracy, religious tolerance,
penicillin, polio and smallpox vaccination, telephones, computers, birth
control, and women's liberation, or return the Bourbon, Habsburg, and
Romanov dynasties to their thrones! Griffin's world-view has no
similarity or affinity whatsoever to those of the "Religious Right,"
"Christian Coalition," Israeli "religious" parties, Taliban, or
al-Qa'eda.

         Griffin admits that from the viewpoint of the "deconstructive
postmodernists" like Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and 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 Derrida, Baudrillard, Lyotard, and
Rorty, "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).

        Griffin has attempted a "constructive postmodernist" reconciliation of
science and religion, based on a Whiteheadian metaphysic and
incorporating data from parapsychology on phenomena like telepathy,
clairvoyance, and psychokinesis, in books like _Parapsychology,
Philosophy, and Spirituality: A Postmodern Exploration_ (SUNY Press,
1997), _Religion and Scientific Naturalism: Overcoming the Conflicts_
(SUNY Press, 2000), and _Unsnarling the World-Knot: Consciousness,
Freedom, and the Mind-Body Problem_ (University of California Press,
1998). In these and other books, Griffin has tried to defend and justify
belief in God, the soul, immortality, free will, prayer, seeming
"miracles," objective Divinely grounded moral and ethical values (of a
largely pacifist and humanitarian rather than "family values" kind), and
theistic evolution. In his latest book, _The New Pearl Harbor_, which I
haven't read yet but plan to get ahold of as soon as possible, I gather
he taises some serious questions about the Bush administration's
handling of the 9/11 attacks--though until I've actually read the book I
wouldn't have any grounds for judging whether he's made some serious
substantive criticisms and investigative reporting, or is just indulging
in a radical-liberal counterpart of paranoid right-wing conspiracy
theorizing as some charge.
 
                 Peace,
                 T. Peter <tpeterpark at erols.com>


-- 
"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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