Philip Goff’s Pan-Optimism

Philosopher Philip Goff is omnipresent these days. Goff, who lectures on the philosophy of mind and consciousness at Durham University in the UK, is a Substack blogger, tweets on X,  hosts a podcast (Mind Chat), contributes regularly to Scientific American, presents at multiple conferences per year, writes academic papers, lay articles, and books, is written about in philosophy magazines, and is interviewed often (I interviewed him a couple of years ago after the release of his book, Galileo’s Error). He even appears in two recent APA Blog Substack newsletters. His influence and renown are growing.

Goff is a proselytizer. He even wrote in a recent Aeon article stating that he is a heretical Christian. But Christianity isn’t really the sugar Goff is pushing. Panpsychism is. He begins each his podcasts with the refrain, “My name is Philip Goff. I’m a philosopher who thinks consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it.” He argues that panpsychism is a “third way” between theism and atheism.

Because we’ve failed to come to grips with issues brewing for decades now—see Noam Chomsky’s three: the climate catastrophe, the continued threat of nuclear war, and the end of mass governance by democracy—many people seem to be struggling with eschatological issues these days. There’s an ugly frisson in the air. We in America are desperate. The voting apparatus is questioned by both sides of the duopoly, the deterioration having begun in earnest with Florida in the 2000 presidential election. The lingering suspicions of end times, accentuated by 400,000,000 guns in circulation among the citizenry, portend conflict. 

Goff offers a tonic. His Third Way wants to reanimate the human spirit and give us all something to believe in beyond our petty selves. Voltaire famously told us that if God did not exist then it would be necessary to invent Him. We can’t hack our aloneness in the universe, and it’s only gotten worse since postmodernism twilighted the idols. In that fading light, Goff’s panpsychism can’t help but appear optimistic in its outlook—but not vulgarly optimistic a lá Voltaire’s portrayal of Leibniz’s “best of all possible worlds” in Candide: war, pestilence, and rapine are all around,  It may be that Goff is pushing us to plant that stable garden in the midst of madness. 

Goff’s philosophy moves more in the way of the Jesuit renegade Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and his cosmology that sought to wed the best and brightest of Christianity and science. This is probably what Goff has in mind when he professes his heretical Christianity. Such a relationship isn’t new, of course. It reverberates throughout the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, in which a main tenet shines: “Divine Love is the substance of Christian Science, the basis of its demonstration, yea, its foundation and superstructure.”

Goff has a new book out, Why? The Purpose of the Universe (2023). This is about as ambitious a title as you could conjure up. It tells the reader that We—the community of readers—still collectively yearn for purpose. It attempts to provide a complete and unified answer to the question posed in the book’s title. That answer is panpsychism. 

Once upon a time, pantheism had some sway and swagger, especially at the time that Spinoza espoused it. God pervades the universe. And three thousand years ago, Moses brought God’s Decalogue back from the wilderness to the Hebrews, which proclaimed, first up: Thou shall not have any other gods. But the problem is: Not everyone is Hebrew, nor Western, nor Yiddish-speaking. The jealous Hebrew God had competitors. And though the Judeo-Christian-Muslim triad of Abraham continues to dominate world mores, maybe to our chagrin, many people in the post-modern era would rather be atheists. So, if Voltaire is correct about the need for a God, then Goff seems to want to find it more locally: in the mind and thus, as persona as it can get. No more waiting for answers and diving codes from the celestial spheres and working with a moral code system plagued by the hypocrisy of its administrators. Panpsychism can seem a Third Way, indeed.

Goff starts off Why? with the chapter aptly titled What’s the Point of Living? He cites the boy Alvy Singer from Woody Allen’s Annie Hall who spends much of his youth kvetching about the uselessness of life. Alvy moons, through Goff, “One day all of the energy in the universe will be used up. The stars will all go out. All matter will be swallowed up by black holes, black holes that will eventually evaporate away.” Meanwhile, Alvy’s uncle keeps pulling magic nickels out of Alvy’s ear and saying, Did you see what I did? Did you See? And you can imagine the uncle as a stand-in for God’s presence when the morose Alvy mutters, walking away, “What an asshole.” Suddenly, he understands Abraham completely.

To this end, Goff also cites David Benatar’s The Human Predicament (2017) and some of its main thrusts: “One day all of the energy in the universe will be used up. The stars will all go out. All matter will be swallowed up by black holes, black holes that will eventually evaporate away.” He adds Benatar’s depressing conclusion: “It would have been better if we’d never existed…it is morally wrong to create new children who will grow up to live lives without significance.” In an almost-amusing anecdote Goff tells us of Raphael Samuel, a twenty-seven-year-old Indian, who, in 2019, “announced to the world that he was suing his parents for bringing him into existence. Samuel had had a happy childhood and was close to his parents, but nonetheless resented being brought into existence without his consent.” Almost amusing, but some of us can relate.

Why? is filled with philosophical and religious allusions and references and anecdotes that liven the reading. The book is consciously written for everyone. Goff tells us:

Academic philosophers tend to talk to themselves. They write complicated, jargon-filled books that are inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t have a PhD in philosophy. I’ve written one of them myself, so I should know. I wanted this book to be both a significant contribution to philosophy and accessible to a broader audience.

His strategy is to have an ‘accessible’ chapter followed by a ‘deeper dive’. This is interesting and raises (or addresses) the question of exclusivity in philosophy.  Some will recall the animus that Socrates roused with his ‘sophistry’, daring fellow democrats to justify their opinions, and Aristophanes famously lit up Socrates as a gadfly in his satirical play, The Clouds.

We also find Goff continuing to tangle with the mind-body problem that, as Goff explains in his previous book, Galileo’s Error, is a problem created by scientific endeavor. The subjective world of sensory experience that makes up the mental phenomena of mind could not be accounted for in an objective fashion, and are “forever locked out of the arena of scientific understanding,” writes Goff. He adds that this lock-out is how “Galileo created the problem of consciousness.” This mind-body dualism, which has been with us now for hundreds of years, accepts that “reality is made up of two very different kinds of thing: immaterial minds on the one hand and physical things on the other.” Goff totally rejects the physicalist view that the mind is actually no more than a chemical process of the brain. Mind exists a priori. No panpsychism would be possible otherwise, since brains are not everywhere.

Why? is methodical in its approach, as its chapters signify. For example: “Why Science Points to Purpose” is followed by “Why Consciousness Points to Purpose” which eventually leads to “Cosmic Purpose Without God,” and then “The Conscious Universe.” Goff’s heretical Christianity progresses without reliance on religious doctrines; instead, he emphasizes community, one that is inclusive of academic thinking and the vox populi. Whatever truths philosophers wrangle on the tenure track, if the other billions and billions of fellow humans can’t feel it, then what has been practically accomplished? He writes:

My hope is that cosmic purposivism may point the way to a new optimism in human potential, a faith based not on dogmatic certainties but on a humble and open exploration of an unfolding purpose we don’t yet fully understand. Times of big change can be frightening, but they are also pregnant with opportunities for renewal. We have every reason to feel optimistic about the future.

However, the reader may feel about religion or universal purpose, Goff’s journey through the unsure terrain of panpsychism is exhilarating and refreshing and his book is worth the read. I can even imagine that somewhere it was under a Christmas tree.

John Hawkins

John Hawkins is a freelance journalist and poet who writes mostly about culture, politics, and the arts. He is currently pursuing a PhD in philosophy at the University of New England (Australia) and, simultaneously, a masters in humanities at Cal State Northridge. He blogs at his Substack site, TantricDispositionMatrix.