Whitehead's Radically Different Postmodern Philosophy: An Argument for Its Contemporary Relevance (review)

To borrow and adapt the title of Stanley Cavell's essay on Emerson,¹ what's the use of calling Alfred North Whitehead a postmodernist? This is a question that David Ray Griffin has been pursuing, seriously and affirmatively, for decades, both in his own writing and in the SUNY Series in Constructive Postmodern Thought that he edits. Taking up the issue again, his most recent philosophical book provides a two-fold answer: viewing Whitehead as a postmodern philosopher, Griffin argues, effectively emphasizes important aspects of his process philosophy as a critique of modern philosophy and also demonstrates its superiority over other versions of postmodernism. The title thus suggests three related topics: the contemporary relevance of Whitehead's philosophy, its particular status as a postmodern philosophy, and its radical difference from other postmodern philosophies. As a general analysis of Whiteheadian thought as a comprehensive and coherent rethinking of the problems of modern philosophy, the book is considerably more convincing in its treatment of these first two issues than the third.

Griffin's study is divided into three parts. Introducing the basic ideas and arguments that tie the whole book together, the first discusses Whitehead's postmodern philosophy in relation to the enlightenment. Chapter one defines what in principle makes Whitehead's thought postmodern while locating it within the general history of postmodernism, which Griffin understands as having undergone a transformation. There is an early postmodernism, identified with the term as employed in the 1960s and 1970s, with which Whitehead's philosophy is compatible, and then there is a later version as formulated in the 1980s and 1990s. The latter usage of the term represents "a radically different meaning, one that made Whiteheadian philosophy seem more an opponent than an exemplification" (vii). This more contemporary form of postmodernism appears throughout the book as the subject of Griffin's scorn, but unfortunately, other than occasional references to Richard Rorty, it remains unclarified to any great extent. Instead, he describes this deleterious postmodernism only generally in terms of its "dominant image" (12): mechanistic in its denial of human freedom and Kantian in its insistence on sensationism as the only form of knowledge, it takes all discourses to be equally groundless and thus nihilistically rejects all metaphysics, all kinds of realism, all rationalist views, all conceptions of truth as correspondence, and all comprehensive explanations of the world. While the two do share certain ideas in common, such as the rejection of essentialized models of subjectivity and a pluralistic promotion of diversity, Whiteheadian postmodernism differs drastically with its contemporary counterparts regarding its views of truth, metaphysics, and God. What makes Whitehead's philosophy postmodern—and simultaneously distinct from other forms of postmodernism—is its particular critique of the modernist philosophical orientation, a materialist and/or dualist worldview that, according to Griffin, is predicated on "the sensationist view of perception, according to which our sensory organs provide our only means of perceiving things beyond ourselves, and the mechanistic view of nature, according to which the ultimate units of nature are devoid of all experience" (8). Whitehead's postmodern philosophy challenges these views by endorsing a theory of prehension incorporating both sensory and nonsensory perception and by taking a panexperiential and panentheistic approach to nature. More specifically, because Whitehead does not reject all aspects of modernism, continuing to promote "its aspiration to universal human liberation" and its rejection of authority in favor of experience as the test of ideas, Griffin is careful to point out that his thinking should more accurately be considered a "postmodern modernism" (13). In this regard, the approach to Whitehead's postmodernism shares something in common with many other recent attempts to rethink various aspects of modernism to different ends.

Chapter two elaborates the postmodernism of Whitehead's philosophy by examining its relationship to those enlightenment ideas that resulted in the impasses of modern philosophy. It begins with an interesting discussion of the enlightenment's historical emergence in...