Charles Hartshorne
Philosophy is reasoning about fundamental beliefs or first principles. Philosophers deal with beliefs, not primarily as advocates or opponents of particular beliefs, rather as elucidators of them. Above all, philosophers explore conceptual possibilities for believing. What creeds people actually have is their affair, but philosophers can show them (a) what reasonably could be believed and (b) upon what grounds. So long at least as they disagree as radically as they do now, philosophers are in no position to tell anyone what beliefs should be adopted; however, they can exhibit candidates for reasonable belief among which choices may be made. The religious fanatic or prophet who says, This you must believe, is the opposite of a philosopher, except in this, that at least the fanatic is concerned with belief. And the philosopher who is more than a mere technician has this concern also. But he is not the final arbiter, rather the clarifier or intellectual explorer, of belief possibilities.
In his task of investigating belief options the philosopher has two resources, intellectual history and logical analysis. With adequate analysis the history might scarcely be needed, but history itself seems to show that analytic capacity is seldom so adequate that the history of similar attempts can safely be neglected. People seem rarely to have the wit and patience to master the conceptual possibilities without the stimulus of finding those who have already taken seriously some of the possible ways of thinking about basic problems. These historical resources are not sufficiently drawn upon. There is “cultural lag” even in learned philosophical circles. I shall present some examples of this phenomenon.
For centuries man debated the issue determinism vs. indeterminism, without sharply distinguishing the possible forms of either, seldom even the obvious forms: (1) absolute causal order, (2) absolute disorder, (3) qualified order-disorder. Since no one can believe in the second, the real issue is between the first and the third. Yet even this minimal analysis is often missing. Instead (1) is defended by pointing to the folly of (2). Since Charles Peirce, in the 19th century, set forth his tychism, it has been inappropriate to argue this topic in so crude a fashion.1 (Boutroux’s similar doctrine in his Contingency of the Law of Nature came even earlier.) Over and over we find the hoary fallacy of arguing: without (absolute, unqualified) determinism ethics is impossible since there can then, it is asserted, be no rational evaluation of cats in terms of consequences or of character in terms of acts expressive of character. As though probability were not “the guide of life,” or as though a qualified, probabilistic determinism might not do all the real work of the absolute form—which even physicists find they can dispense with!
That the crude issue, determinism-indeterminism, is still debated instances cultural lag as well as lack of analysis. Moreover, there are at least two forms of nonabsolute determinism. (1) Ideal knowledge of events and laws would yield similarly definite knowledge of their predecessors or antecedent conditions, but not equally definite knowledge of their successors or consequences. (2) Even ideal knowledge of events and laws could not yield more than approximate or statistical knowledge either of preceding or of subsequent events. (1) was held by Whitehead and before him by Peirce and Bergson. (2) seems to be held by many physicists. Sufficient analysis would have set forth these conceptual possibilities long ago. Kant did not clearly see this, he never really explored the etiological options. He “knew” the right conceptual possibility, the classical Newtonian view, and let it go at that. (His language is sometimes vague enough so that one can interpret it to mean a better view than he himself espoused.
Consider how the question of deity has been dealt with. For nearly two millennia (beginning with Philo) it was agreed that God must be conceived as uncaused, immutable, independent, necessary and infinite, and all of these without qualification. The alternative was taken to be the doctrine that all these things are in every aspect caused, mutable, dependent, etc. But a really careful analysis would see at least the following options: (1) everything is in every aspect caused, etc.; (2) at least something (God) is in some but not every aspect uncaused, etc.; (3) something is in every aspect uncaused, etc. From Aristotle to Kant (Plato was better here, and not only here) what philosopher even mentioned (2)? Only the Socinian theologians asserted mutability and contingency in God, while yet holding that his existence is eternal and necessary.2 No one has demonstrated any contradiction in this position. Yet for two centuries it was brusquely rejected (i.e., by Spinoza and Leibniz) or ignored. Why cannot a being exist, and have a defining essence, necessarily, yet also have accidental properties that together with the necessary essence constitute the total divine reality? Only Leibniz among philosophers held a doctrine that would exclude this idea, for who but he denied that individuals can have accidental qualities? (Spinoza of course rejected the very concept of contingency, but few theologians agreed with him.)
To this very day one can find people arguing (though a small proportion now than formerly) as though the idea of God, that is, of worshipful reality, entailed complete immutability. I have yet to see a valid deduction of this negative property from the idea. It is not valid to argue: worshipful therefore with all possible perfection, hence incapable of change. For, as Kant rightly pointed out, “all possible perfection” may (I say does) conceal a contradiction since there are mutually incompatible possible goods, and therefore if worship makes sense it cannot imply the supposed concept of perfection. Whitehead makes this impossibility of exhaustive actualization of value an axiom of his system, as Leibniz should have done but failed to do.3 Berdyaev too has seen the point. Since Kant, a forteriori since Berdyaev and Whitehead, the deduction referred to (first proposed in a platonic dialogue), if taken as noncontroversial, instances cultural lag.
Another remarkable example of failure to profit from analyses already performed is in the treatment of Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Anselm had two theories, logically quite independent of one another (unless one holds that they are mutually incompatible) concerning existence, and he successively employed the two theories in his famous Proslogium. Consequently he (like Descartes later) had two ontological arguments, as Malcolm, anticipated by me, pointed out.4 Correct analysis must deal with each on its merits. What happened was rather that nearly everyone, especially after Kant, whether they defended or attacked the argument(s), dealt only with the first argument. According to this, there is such a thing as feigned or merely conceived existence and this is always inferior to real existence (extra mentem); the argument then is that the unsurpassably great or good cannot lack the merit of real rather than merely conceived existence, because it would then, contrary to the definition, not be unsurpassably great. With Malcolm and most philosophers I incline to reject this reasoning. According to the second theory of existence, the distinction is not between merely conceived vs. real existence but between contingent vs. necessary existence. The supposition “God really exists but his nonexistence is conceivable” is as directly contradictory, according to Anselm as the supposition that he fails to exist. To compare merely conceived with real existence in this case is absurd, since the former is ruled out. Instead we compare what can and what cannot be “merely conceived” to exist. Moreover Anselm had a fairly complex theory (largely correct so far as it goes, I hold) of the general traits of the two modes of existing. Thus the contingent is capable not only of existing and of failing to exist, but of beginning (and ceasing?) to exist? It is necessarily imperfect, for its very existence depends upon favorable (never absolutely favorable) circumstances or causes. The unconditionally superior could not exist in this conditional way. To say “it exists necessarily on condition that it exists” is contrary. Conditions are ruled out in this case. Until Malcolm, Hartshorne and Findlay pointed it out, there had been an almost total neglect, even by most defenders of the argument, of the role of this second view (most clearly put in the reply to Gaunilo).5 The excuse given has been that if necessary existence is a predicate deducible from unsurpassability, then so is existence. Of course, but this not only does not entail, it conflicts with, the idea that existence in general is a deducible predicate. Only necessary existence is such a predicate. What is proved of God is not that, among the things which exist (in the ordinary mode of existing), there must also be God, but rather that whereas ordinary existence is never, extraordinary existence is, a deducible predicate. Neither Anselm nor most of his critics shed enough light upon this distinction.
This is far from all. Findlay and I have shown that one must not identify what ordinary and necessary “existence” have in common with concrete actuality, whether ordinary or divine. All concrete reality, which I call “actuality”—including the actuality of God—must be contingent.6 It follows that the necessarily existing essence of God (or of “the Absolute,” to name Findlay’s somewhat different conception) is not the only divine property. There must also be divine accidents, relative and contingent divine qualities. The only theistic way to escape what I call the “Findlay paradox” (see below) is to modify the traditional definition of God as wholly absolute and necessary, and allow for a real duality of necessary and contingent in God or the unsurpassable. In this way one does some justice to both sides in the prolonged dispute. “All concrete actuality is contingent” (not deducible a priori) replaces “all existence is contingent.” (I have shown that the distinction between existence [in all cases more or less abstract] and actuality is applicable to ordinary as well as to divine existence and is no mere matter of terminology.)7
One can grant another point to the rejectors of the argument. Anselm assumes, with only rather weak justification, that his formula, “none greater is conceivable,” is itself conceivable, free from logical absurdity or contradiction. One has only to recall the puzzles of set theory. Given any number it seems a greater is conceivable, given any being . . .
But, and here is another common failure of analysis, this objection to the argument does not imply that the argument proves nothing. For if the only weak point of the reasoning is the possible absurdity of the idea of God, it follows that either God exists (necessarily) or his existence is logically impossible. And this is far from a trivial conclusion. For it means that the primary theistic question is non-empirical, in a broad sense logical or a priori. One corollary is that if the atheistic argument from evil is offered as empirical it cannot be valid. Nonsense is nonsense, whatever the empirical facts.
I have argued that Anselm’s interpretation of the divine unsurpassability is indeed incoherent, but that a revised formula (unsurpassable by another being, thus allowing for self-surpassing and hence change) escapes being incoherent (at least for the same reason). This revision is also, as was implied above, required to evade the Findlay paradox. This paradox is that, supposing (as Anselm did) that there is no valid distinction between necessary divine essence or existence and contingent divine actuality, and supposing that nevertheless God is concrete or actual, not a mere abstraction, the ontological argument must then mean that deduction from a highly abstract formula yields a concrete reality. And this, I contend, is the strongest possible way to put the objection to the idea of deducible existence. If anything is clear it is that, from the wholly abstract only abstract conclusions can be derived. And what could be more abstract than Anselm’s formula?8
The paradox collapses if one is in a position to grant that God’s mere existence is indeed abstract, being the unconditionally necessary truth that his essence is actualized somehow, in some divine actuality. The definite (contingent) how it is actualized, the divine actuality, is alone concrete, and it is not to be known b y any abstract argument. Thus “God exists, knowing whatever else exists” may follow from an ontological argument, but not “he exists knowing you and me.” For to know that one needs the additional and contingent premise that we exist. How it could have escaped our ancestors that there must be such a distinction between necessary and contingent aspects of God is somewhat hard to explain.
Plato (Theatetus, Sophist) considered a form of logical atomism akin to Hume’s “what is distinguishable is separable” and for notable reasons rejected it. Peirce, in his theory of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, by implication at least showed that the doctrine falsifies the essential nature of experience and is illogical.9 (Alas publication of most of the relevant writings came only in the early thirties.) Yet Russell, all his adult life almost, and many others have rested their case upon the atomistic doctrine, never defending it against its most competent critics, but only against the contrary monistic extreme (as in Bradley). This contrary extreme seems equally in defiance of experience and of logic. It is equally wrong to say distinguishability and separability always go together, and to say, they ever go together. In the former case there is no Peircean Secondness or Thirdness: in the latter case there is no Firstness. But I believe Peirce showed one for all that the three categories form an irreducible minimum. They are translatable into Whitehead’s terminology with little difficulty. Secondness becomes prehension, and since the past only is prehended, each actuality is a First so far as subsequent actualities are concerned.
The fallacy common to both pluralistic and monistic extremes is in not seeing that whereas distinguishability (nonidentity, nonequivalence) is symmetrical, separability is not. The complex XY cannot be without X, but X can be without XY. Yet clearly the complex is not identical with one of its members. The entire controversy early in this century over internal versus external relations was vitiated by an assumption of symmetry made by both sides. The assumption was embedded even in the definition of “internal,” and hence of external, employed by them.10 Peirce’s definition of Secondness did not entirely avoid ambiguity here, but he was much closer to clarity on the issue. Whitehead’s definition of prehension is unambiguous, even though unfortunately he sometimes seems to imply that contemporary and future events are also prehended. This however he does not literally say, and often literally denies.
True enough, Hume’s or Russell’s principle of universal separability follows from the assumption that all complexes can be analyzed into absolute simples. On the contrary, if X is not separable from Y then the relation to Y is a complication in X, and indeed X is equivalent to X and Y. In propositional logic, (p → q) ≡ (p ≡ pq). But this only shifts the issue to that concerning the assumption of simples. Wittgenstein in his maturity sagaciously abandoned that assumption, and therewith reopened the Humean-Russellian problem of relations. This too is not today properly appreciated, and here is another cultural lag. Indeed it can be shown that the connection between merely external relations and absolute simples was close to the surface in the Buddhist Nagarjuna’s analysis many centuries before Hume and on the other side of the world.
It is evident that those countless theologians who with good reason held God to exist necessarily and independently but the world contingently and independence upon God were by implication assuming the falsity of Hume’s Principle; therefore in taking the principle to be beyond discussion Hume was deciding the theistic issue ab initio. There was no need for elaborate deductions or reasonings, as in the Dialogues, to reach a nontheistic conclusion. The same is true of Hume’s brusque rejection of the idea of necessary existence. In this and still other ways Hume failed to enter into a real debate with theists, but only announced his disagreement with them.
In fairness to Hume it may be said that had the theists been clear about the logic of their position Hume could hardly have been as unclear as he was about the requirements for an adequate exploration of the possibilities for belief. A theist is one who believes, among other things, that the distinguishable may be separable in one direction (God from this world) but inseparable in the other (this world from God). He is also one who believes that not all existence is contingent, nor yet is it all necessary.
It isn’t only theism which implies separability of the distinguishable in some but not all cases. The same holds of the idea of experience as essentially having data which are what they are independently of being given to this or that particular experience, though of course the particular experience is not independent of the data, rather it requires them. In short, experience realistically interpreted contradicts Hume’s principle. Only a counter-intuitive epistemology, as well as a counter-intuitive theology, remains open once one has entered the vestibule of Hume’s or Russell’s dwelling. However, before Hume no really clear statement of the relational requirements, theological or epistemological, had been made.
I must also renounce the temptation to develop the evidence that the concept of omnipotence, taken as Hume took it to connote theological determinism and therefore the acute form of the problem of evil, had long ago (even in the Book of Job) been shown to be a doubtful interpretation of divine or unsurpassable power, and had been rejected by a number of theologians, most clear-headedly by the Socinians. (After Hume similar views have been held by Fechner, Lequier, Whitehead, and many others.) In this respect also Hume failed to criticize theism in its most coherent form and on its own ground. But alas most theologians had failed to defend it in that form and on that ground.
Plato by implication held that knowing is essentially valuing (one way of putting his point that the Good is the idea or form); Leibniz held that all activity is appetitive and by implication that all perception is concerned with value; Berkeley held that one cannot distinguish between sensation and certain feelings of value11; Goethe, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Bosanquet, Bradley, Croce, Whitehead, Hartshorne and others, including some experimental psychologists, supported this view.12 These men also held that the effective nature of sensation makes a dualism of mind and mindless matter a mere verbal formula with no basis in experience, and some form of metaphysical idealism the most reasonable view. Have the critics of idealism paid any serious attention to this line of argument? I do not find that they have. (C. I. Lewis is perhaps an exception.) Mostly they ignore the argument, or at best brush it aside with dogmatic pronouncements.13 To suppose, as some have done, that Berkeley argued for idealism merely from the question-begging definition of objects as “ideas,” or from the ego-centric “predicament,” is to demonstrate a failure to read Berkeley with sufficient care. There is a phenomenological basis for idealism—not necessarily idealism in the Berkeleyan (or Russellian) form; indeed as I am about to argue not best in that form—an appeal to intuitive experience quite independent of the strange use of “idea” in Locke and Berkeley. This phenomenological basis is rather ignored than carefully considered by opponents of idealism. I know that Whitehead, like Croce, regarded it as decisive.
From Descartes to Husserl many philosophers have talked as though it made sense to suppose an experience having only itself as its datum, or as though all experience might be self-experience, and nothing else. “Immediately given are only our own mental states.” But Moore showed, what analysis could have disclosed long before, that this reduces to absurdity, at best to a solipsism of the present moment.14 In the case of memory a “mental state” at least claims to exhibit the having occurred of another mental state. Reject this claim and what is left? Whitehead argues that there cannot even be solipsism of the present moment, since introspection (as Husserl seems to see and yet not to see) is really retrospection. So the irreducible minimum of experience has a subject-object structure in such fashion that if the independent object is denied, the experience or subject must be denied also. (Surely my past experience did not depend upon how I now remember it! The “mistakes of memory” are disproof of this only for those relying upon crude analyses on this topic, as so many indeed have.)
When I was a student at Harvard in 1923 an instructor named Bell, who retired early to be a country gentleman in Nova Scotia, taught us that one great mistake of modern philosophy was the supposition that it makes sense to talk of experience as self-sufficient entities, perhaps only seeming to possess independent data. I learned the same lesson, as I thought, from a book of Lossky’s (probably the only thing I ever did learn from him). So, when I went to study with Husserl and found him naively, as it seemed to me, indulging in such talk (taking the having of real objects to be “intentions” or “claims” that logically could be wholly invalid) I thought I knew where I was. Ortega earlier, Heidegger and others at nearly the same time or later made similar objections.15 To my mind Husserl came too late with his program. We already knew better; or at least we knew that if anything was not “presuppositionless” it was such as “hypothesis,” (Ortega’s word in this connection) as the possibility of self-sufficient experiences. After 47 years I still find Husserl’s Ideen naive in the same (and still other) respects.
Another example: before Leibniz (nearly three centuries ago) not a single philosopher had ever seriously asked, what in nature (apart from animals) do we experience as truly individual, truly singular entities, rather than aggregates? Analysis could have shown Aristotle that “the real is the individual” poses a paradox; at least when it comes to inanimate nature. Is an ocean one individual, or is the individual all the oceans together, or a drop of ocean water, all water, or what? True the Greek atomists had a doctrine of the real singulars, but they could not claim that we experienced these as such. Leibniz agreed with Aristotle that we (our souls) and other animals are singulars, but agreed also with the atomists that the singulars in inanimate nature are hidden from perception, which there discloses only aggregates. He concluded that tour only means of understanding singularity is by generalizing the analogy between oneself and other individuals so widely that it can apply even on the atomic level. Now this reasoning was in principle epoch-making. But most philosophers have blithely ignored it. Here cultural lag has been widespread and persists to this day.
Peirce and Whitehead agree with the above reasoning, save for one qualification. After all, they say, the final concrete singulars are events, not enduring individuals. The actuality of individuals, e.g. of persons, consists in successive embodiments of their personality traits, each embodiment having certain vivid and constitutive relations to its predecessors. If universals are specified or particularized in individuals, individuals are further specified by their moment to moment experiences and acts. And these final singulars are now “windowless.” With these qualifications the agreement between Whitehead and Leibniz on the singular-aggregate issue is close. And Peirce is similar.
The two recent philosophers just mentioned are also largely free from the other examples of cultural lag I have mentioned above. They are, far more than recent writers, in the clear with the history of ideas and with the results of analytic exploration. They are usually aware of the doctrines they implicitly reject. Was Dewey or Wittgenstein, is Heidegger, aware of as many of the conceptual possibilities? These three men show ways of minimizing belief, economizing on that aspect of life. But what help can they give to those not happy with so meager a creedal fare? I am not thinking only of conventionally religious people or theologians. Scientists also would like some help beyond the mere injunction not to fall into such extreme linguistic traps as ultra-skepticism, solipsism, purely private language, inextended mind in extended body, and the like. Since Bergson, James, Peirce, and Whitehead, it is cultural lag to take the sheer “inextendedness” of concrete mental states as noncontroversial.16 All of these men reject or sharply qualify this description. They admit also that mental states have causes and consequences, and if the psychical and psychological causality is not strictly deterministic, neither, according to them, is any causality. So there is here no “ghost in the machine,? And Ryle’s polemic has become largely irrelevant.
I think it fair to say that philosophically cultural lag has always been marked in Britain. Berkeley’s idealism was formulated without the slightest attention to the earlier and to my mind more instructive version of Leibniz. Contemporary British philosophy is running true to form. Metaphysics is discussed, ignoring nearly every one on the metaphysicians of note of the past one hundred years. Ortega says that the British empiricists gave us not philosophy but “a series of very acute objections to all philosophy.” In this it must be confessed that Wittgenstein is eminently British. But there—so are Bouwsma and even Quine.
I must however add that Hume’s, Moore’s, and Wittgenstein’s “objections to philosophy” were probably necessary if the hold of certain traditional dogmas in theology and metaphysics was to be sufficiently weakened to facilitate further advance. It was indeed undue trust in highly technical or unusual uses of words that made these dogmas seem invulnerable. Words like “absolute,” “perfect,” “infinite,” “simple,” phrases like “necessary and sufficient condition,” or “the cause must equal the effect,” and many another were used in pretentious ways not justified by the degree of care with which they were explicated and related to experience and to words in ordinary, well certified use. And even though Bergson, Peirce, James, and Whitehead were rather well aware of this very point, it may well be that without the British the lesson would not have sunk in nearly so deeply as in fact it has. Our danger now is perhaps almost the opposite, that we have too little trust in the technical work done by our ancestors.
A final word. The ideal of making full use of work already done in philosophy is only an ideal. Of course readers will be able to think of relevant insights embodied in the literature which I have failed to appropriate. The old saying “art is long, life is short” is only part of the problem. For new insights keep coming and no one can absorb them as fast as they emerge. We do the best we can.
Notes
1. See The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, ed. Hartshorne and Weiss, Harvard University Press, 1966 1.147, 155-62, 174f, 401-403, 428; 6.35-65, 86f, 96f.
2. See the translation of some passages from Fausto Socinus and Johannes Krell (as paraphrased by Otto Fock) in Philosophers Speak of God, 287-89. C. Hartshorne and W. L. Reese. University of Chicago Press, 1953.
3. Adventures of Ideas, (Ch. xix, Sec. 3)
4. N. Malcolm, “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” Philosophical Review, 69 (1960), 42-52. C. Hartshorne and W. L. Reese, op. Cit., pp. 96-97.
5. See my book Anselm’s Discovery (Open Court, 1966).
6. See my Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (London, SCM. 1970: La Salle. Open Court, 1970), 246f., 254.
7. Ibid., pp. 74f., 251
8. Ibid., p. 246
9. Peirce, Collected Papers.
10. Creative Synthesis, pp. 21ff.
11. First Dialogue between Hylas and Philonus. Also Berkeley’s Commonplace Book (ed. Fraser), pp. 39, 62.
12. Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934), pp. 88-94, 162, 169ff., 177n., 278ff. Also Epigraphs.
13. Perry, R. B., General Theory of Value (New York: Longman’s Green and Company, 1926), pp. 31-32.
14. G. E. Moore, “The refutation of idealism,” Mind (1903); republished in Philosophical Studies (London, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922).
15. Ortega y Gassett, J. The Idea of Principle in Leibniz and the Evolution of Deduction. Tr. by M. Adams. (New York: Norton, 1971.) 29.
16. Creative Synthesis, pp. 113f.
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“Analysis and Cultural Lag in Philosophy.” Southern Journal of Philosophy 11, 2-3 (Spring and Summer 1973): 105-112.