Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude, by D.S. Clarke (2003), a brief review.

3 stars out of 5.

While there is much to respect here, I found myself irked by several features of this book, which I'll list in order of importance. (1) It is weighed down by longeurs that felt digressive and tedious, without much direct relevance to panpsychism. (2) Its appreciation for "the religious attitude" seemed to me quite limited and superficial, with the marks of religious inexperience and an overly concrete style of thinking. Last (3), its cultural competence left a great deal to be desired. Consider this passage: 

To use 'God' as a form of address links supplicants to the members of communities worshipping the God of Abraham, David, and Jesus in the past. But it does not link them to those within Islamic communities in which 'Allah' has been the form of address (168). 

This is just silly; all three Abrahamic religions worship the same God, and the name "Allah" is simply an Arabic word for "God," cognate with Hebrew "El." Moreover, all three named persons are Jews, and this goes unremarked. Abraham, the first monotheist, was also the first Jew (some people feel the need to paper-over this inconvenience by insisting, quite ahistorically, that "Abraham was a Muslim," which is rather like insisting Jesus was American). David was the Jews' greatest King, who governed the ancient Jewish state at its height. Jesus was a charismatic young Rabbi and itinerant healer who was tortured to death by the Roman military garrison, like so many other victims of Roman imperial violence (he was no Christian). The good Dr. Clarke is typical of Gentile intellectuals in his breezy use of the term "Judeo-Christian," a mildly obnoxious coinage consistent with others like "Old Testament." Jewish scholars like the great Gershom Scholem and Arthur Cohen write essays and books about the rudeness and wrongness of these terms, but it is mainly Jews who ever read them. Forgive my digression--the same fault I found with this book at the top of this brief review--but lately this issue is on my mind. 

Panpsychism and the Religious Attitude is an intelligent book, but it did not further my thinking. One of its uses is that it unwittingly illustrates what it was like to think about the then-missing function of consciousness before Antonio Damasio and Jaak Panksepp and Mark Solms figured out what its function was. Consciousness evolved (at least, embodied consciousness evolved) as an organism's capacity for feelings that give each of its bodily needs a distinctive quale, so that the organism can sift these qualia in order of urgency and meet the needs in an appropriate sequence. An urgent need to flee a predator takes precedence over a less urgent need to eat, or a much less urgent need to reproduce. The system called consciousness successfully maintains homeostasis because each of the different needs feels significantly different to the living organism. While this 2003 work of Clarke's does quote someone who refers generally to homeostasis as the purpose of consciousness, there was in these pages no fuller account than that. I don't know whether Damasio and others had articulated it yet or not, but it seems not to have pervaded the discipline back then the way it has in the meantime (see Solms' superb 2021 volume, The Hidden Spring).