Charles Hartshorne
Background. From the outset I was given intensive but liberal religious training in my home, my father’s Episcopal church, and an Episcopal boarding school (now nonexistent) which I attended for four happy years before going to college. Also, in my teens, came exposure to Emerson’s Essays, which I found wonderfully stimulating and inspiring, and Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, which startled me a good deal. At Haverford, during my two years there, I read Coleridge’s rehash of German idealism (his Aids to Reflection), and felt the influence of Rufus Jones, the Quaker mystic. From the age of fifteen or so, I was influenced by the English poets, especially Wordsworth and Shelley. My Training at Harvard was partly in English literature; for the rest, apart from one good course in zoology, it was in philosophy and psychology. In the latter two subjects I had about ten excellent teachers, including Lewis, Flocking, Perry, McDougll and L. T. Troland. Two years of postdoctoral study were mostly at Freiburg and Marburg under a similar number of distinguished men, including Husserl, Heidegger, and Nicolai Hartmann.
While in a humble role as instructor and research fellow at Harvard, 1925-28, I simultaneously felt the profound influence of the writings of Peirce which I was editing (part of the time aided by Weiss), and also of the writings and physical presence of Whitehead, who had come to Harvard while I was in Europe. Thereafter came long association with the pragmatism and positivism of the philosophy department at the University of Chicago. There was some slight exposure to linguistic analysis there, and also at the University of Melbourne (1952). More recently, I have paid much attention to the Hindu and Buddhist traditions, especially the latter.
It seems to me that I have been more influenced by reading than by direct contact with teachers. In the pupil-teacher relationship I was always more or less detached and critical, reserving judgment. No teacher swept me along to the same extent as Emerson once did, or as Peirce’s writings or Whitehead’s did in my mature years. And it was in wrestling with the works of Emerson, Royce, James, Plato, Spinoza, Russell, Peirce, Whitehead, and a score of others, that my philosophical convictions came into being—except so far, rather far, as they grew out of direct reflection upon experience, somewhat in the manner of the phenomenologists, but unlike them, under the influence of certain poets. (I could not take very seriously Husserl’s claims to presuppositionlessness, partly because he seemed to me not to find in experience what I was confident of finding there.)
Method. I go part way with ordinary language enthusiasts, but with reservations connected with certain limitations of that language for extraordinary problems (extreme cases, very large or very small magnitudes, eternal or necessary aspects of reality).
I go part way with McKeon and others in stressing the historical method, but again with reservations. The history of philosophizing comes fully alive only for those who already are philosophers.
I take formal logic seriously as an aid to clarity in argument, but I take equally seriously intuitive data from direct experience, including practical, ethical, aesthetic, and religious experience. In this I share some common ground with certain existentialists, e.g., Berdyaev and William James, and also with Buddhists.
Doctrines. Before exposure to Peirce and Whitehead, the influence of James, Royce, Bergson, and many others had made me something of a “process philosopher” and “process theologian,” with an anti-materialistic and antidualistic—broadly “idealistic”—slant; Peirce and Whitehead confirmed these beliefs and helped to give much more definite structure to them. My special contributions to process thought are perhaps the following.
Twelve Elements of My Philosophy
1. Development of, evidence for, and consequences of the theory of sensations as a subclass of feelings—the “affective continuum.”
2. Clarification of issues connected with the process idea of deity (admission of an aspect of becoming and novelty in God): “perfection” defined as “unsurpassability by another”; panentheism; principle of dual transcendence.
3. Doctrinal matrices: method of decision by elimination from formally exhaustive divisions of doctrinal possibilities.
4. Theistic proofs (six or seven forms) as applications of (3); emphasis upon universal creativity, lime pervasiveness of real chance, as solution of problem of evil.
5. A logic of ultimate contras. (absolute-relative, abstract-concrete, object-subject).
6. A logic of contingency and necessity, including a new defense of the possibility of metaphysics and new perspectives on the ontological argument.
7. Theory of beauty as a mean between extremes in two dimensions.
8. Primacy of asymmetrical conceptions and directional order.
9. Defense of the pragmatic theory of truth so far as eternal or necessary truths are concerned (the eternal or necessary cannot be bad or ugly).
10. Revision of Whitehead’s eternal objects in the direction of Peirce’s synechistic-evolutionary version of “Platonism.”
11. Defense and new applications of Whitehead’s epochal theory of becoming.
12. Self-interest as a special case of interest in others.
Some Details
1. Sensory qualities are intrinsically adaptive, hence intrinsically emotive (since emotion is the primitive response to helpful and harmful aspects of situations). Thus, natural poisons mostly taste or smell sour or bitter and nourishing foods, sweet. Painful stimuli are harmful, and the pain is an incipient withdrawal, as are sour and bitter tastes. This is the general principle of all sensation. Thus, red is a danger signal (blood) and has the appropriate emotional quality. These emotive qualities are innate, fixed by the evolution of the sense organs, not by individual life histories.
2. The denial of change in any form to deity makes it impossible to make sense of religious language, as does the supposition that deity is capable of any and every form of change (e.g., of corruption or degeneracy). The Platonic deduction of immutability from the idea of an absolute maximum of value, a good in no way and in no sense surpassable, falsely assumes that absolute unsurpassability must be a defining characteristic of the religious reality. But this is false to religious feeling. What is indeed required is unsurpassability by another. Deity must be exalted beyond the possibility of rivalry, and hence worthy of worship by all. But this is compatible with self-surpassability. This logical point was long overlooked. Moreover, the idea of an absolute maximum of good contradicts the valid Leibnizian principle of incompatible values. A suns of “all positive perfections” all actualized is not a logically admissible idea. Net is it needed for religion.
3. In reasoning we must either start with absolutely certain truths or else with an exhaustive survey of candidates for the status of truth, with the hope of arriving at the right one by eliminating those we can see to be false. As Popper rightly holds, falsification is the basic operation, not direct verification. This holds even in metaphysics, though here falsification must be a priori, i.e., by discovering absurdity, not merely conflict with fact. But elimination of error is significant only if possibilities can be classified into a finite exhaustive set.
Examples: It is fallacious to argue, “relations cannot (all) be external, therefore they must (all) be internal,” or to argue, “relations cannot (all) be internal, therefore they must (all) be external.” One must consider three cases: a relation may be external to both or all terms; it may be internal to both (or all) terms; it may be external to one term and internal to another. Or, more clearly put, there may be mutual independence, mutual interdependence, or, third, one-way dependence-independence between terms. Nine-tenths of the controversies about relations have neglected the asymmetrical case of dependence-independence. Yet it is far from obviously unimportant. We depend on our ancestors, not our descendants; and any universal is independent of any one person’s entertaining the idea, but not vice versa. Again controversies about determinism commonly consider but two possibilities, determinism and indeterminism. But here the second term covers everything from the extreme assumption of absolute chaos to the view that events are approximately or at least statistically ordered causally (so that any departures from strict determinism are but slight). Over and over again it is argued that since the absolute opposite to strict determinism is untenable and absurd, therefore absolute determinism is to be accepted. But the absolute opposite to an absurdity is usually another absurdity. Causal order may be neither absolute nor totally lacking (in some relative or approximate form). Still another example: Is God immutable (in all aspects) or mutable (in all aspects)? The proper question is whether God is in all aspects, in some aspects, or in no aspects mutable. For two thousand years countless thinkers debated the dyadic form of this clearly triadic question.
4. Theistic proofs as deductive should be taken as exhaustive sets of mutually exclusive views. My proposal is to arrange these in order of increasing approximation to the view to be defended. Thus, perhaps (a) there is no cosmic order in any significant sense (it need not be defined deterministically), or (b) there is such an order but there is no universal ordering power explanatory of the order, or (c) there is such all order and such a power, but it is not supremely good or divine, finally, (d) there is such an order and such a power and it is divine. Those who can accept (a) will not be convinced by the proof, nor will those who can accept (b) or (c); but those who find the first three unconvincing should indeed accept (d). Of course, it depends upon one’s general philosophical stance and training how one evaluates the four proposals. My philosophy makes the fourth alone acceptable.
There are about six other forms of theistic argument analogous in structure to the foregoing. The ontological is one of these. With all of them the theistic option is for me the most credible.
5. Since Aristotle, it has been fairly common to regard abstract entities or forms as existent only in more concrete entities, e.g., either substances or events (experiences). I have generalized this to cover other contrasts, thus: absolute-relative, simple-complex, mutable-immutable, object-subject, earlier-later, necessary-contingent. To take the last case, the necessary is this all the contingent possibilities have in common. Thus, necessary truths are true no matter what contingent propositions are true or false. The complete or concrete truth is always contingent, but all possible truths have certain abstract truths in common. It follows from all this that to she deity to be wholly necessary is to imply that God is but an abstract aspect of contingent reality. (God as purely necessary is indeed such an aspect; but it is unwitting blasphemy to identify God with his necessary and eternal essence.)
6. From the above it follows that, since the necessary is the abstract common denominator of concrete things, contingency and concreteness belong together. Strictly necessary are only extremely abstract ideas, such as reality or being. That “there is something rather than nothing” is just as abstract as “there is nothing.” (For the idea of “something” is as abstract as you please.) The difference is only that, whereas the truth of “there is something” is knowable, that of “there is nothing” is not. I hold that “the absolutely unknowable” is mere verbiage. There must be something. Contingency comes in only as we specify what sort of something. Moreover, such specification must go beyond mere logical-type distinctions, e.g., something concrete. For how could there be anything at all if there were nothing concrete? Abstracts are parasitic upon the concrete. To introduce contingency we must use empirical notions, e.g., fish, human beings, hydrogen atoms. The reason these introduce contingency is that they are competitive. Every animal occupies space and uses materials which, if it had not existed, would have been available for some other sort of creature or some other individual.
Competitiveness, I am convinced, is the key to contingency. If God exists necessarily, this can only be because he exists noncompetitively. He does not exist instead of something else, or in place of something else. The way in which he is in reality competes with no other way of being in it. Even Anselm did not make this point. God is neither “instead of” something else, nor is he “in addition to” something else; rather, everything else is in addition to him. To say “John exists” is to say “God and John exist”; for God would have existed with or without John.
7. Beauty is the central aesthetic value, deviations from which occur in two dimensions. The opposite extreme from the ugly (in the sense of radically un-unified, discordant variety) is radically monotonous or unvaried unity; beauty is equally distant from these two extremes. But suppose the beautiful mean between undiversified unity and un-unified diversity occurs on a trivial level of complexity and intensity, for example, a musical chord. We might call this “pretty” rather than beautiful. Suppose, at the opposite extreme, the mean is on so complex and intense a level that “sublime” is more appropriate than “beauty.” So beauty in the most usual sense is the mean between the discordant and the merely concordant and also between the triflingly simple or un-intense and the sublimely complex or intense. All the aesthetic values, including the comic and the tragic, can thus be put on a two-dimensional circle with beauty at the center.
8. The primacy of asymmetrical relations is already illustrated in ( 3) and ( 5). It can be shown that formal logic supports this primacy.
9. The trouble with James’s pragmatic theory of truth is that until we know what statements are factually true we do not know what statements are pragmatically valuable, at least intersubjectively and in the long run. Facts are not always what we might wish them to be. But with metaphysical or a priori and necessary statements, it is impossible that these statements could be true and yet also have negative value in any reasonable sense. Contingent facts can be regrettable, but this may not be said of necessary truths. For to say “regrettable” is to say that it would have been better had they not obtained, and this makes sense only if the truths are contingent. There can be no rationality in quarreling with what could not have been otherwise. Thus, it cannot be rational to object to the existence of God on the ground that things would be better without him, or to quarrel with the nonexistence of God on the ground that things would be better with him. If God exists, he could not have failed to exist; and if he fails to exist, he could not have existed. Hence, I infer, to know that it would be good if there is a God, or good if there were no God, is the same as to know that there is a God, or that there is not. On such issues, the idea that some things would be fine if they were true, although they may unfortunately be false, is illogical. The necessary or eternal framework of things can only be good, and nothing can be missing from it which ought to be there, or which one can reasonably wish were there.
It follows that an a priori ethical or value argument for theism, if valid in its own terms, is not to be refuted by the contention that our ethical needs are perhaps not met by reality. Kant’s ethical argument was a priori, for it applied to rational beings as such. Its defects can be remedied, provided the summum bonum and the idea of God are more carefully conceived than they were by Kant. But then the argument becomes just as definitive as any “theoretical” argument. The whole notion that we must adapt to reality, however ugly or unfavorable to us, is applicable only to contingent matters of a more concrete sort than the bare alternative, existence or nonexistence of deity. If deity ought to be, then it is.
10. By siding with Peirce rather than with Whitehead about the realm of forms, I can mediate between Whitehead and certain nominalistic tendencies in much current thought and avoid certain difficulties in Whitehead’s system. Peirce’s view was that etemal possibilities (for example, possible sense-qualities) forma continuum. A continuum is not a plurality of definite parts but a matrix out of which pa., beyond any definite limit, can be produced or “evolved.” The parts of possibility are themselves only potentially parts, and the realization of their particulate character requires actualization, which proceeds only in time, not in eternity.
11. If we give up the idea that substances are the most concrete items of reality, then all that is left are momentary states, truly singular events. But no such singulars can be found if becoming is .ken as strictly continuous. For a continuum has, as such, no definite unit-parts. I defend Whitehead here, as against Bergson and Dewey, and many others, because I find Leibniz convincing on the point that pluralism implies singulars, and if the singulars are not changing individuals, what is left but singular even? As Whitehead says, these become, rather than change.
12. If the final singulars are momentary, then the old ethical question of self-interest vs. altruism acquires a new meaning. For to a given singular event all other events are indeed “other,” and interest in them is interest not in self but in others. So, if self-interest takes the future into account, it is really a special form of altruism. Moreover, analysis will show that it is not correct to suppose that this special form of altruism is the ground or principle of the general form. Interest in other singulars is the principle, and there is no absolute difference between the two main forms this interest takes. Nor is self-interest the justification for the interest in others (in the usual sense of others).
The Buddhist tradition is the only one in all the world that has for two thousand years been dear in these matters. And Whitehead thinks a good deal like the Buddhists in this, as in some other respects. Peirce is rather similar on this issue. And I had a comparable though much less clearly worked-out position before I knew either of these men or their work. For 55 years I have watched with some wonder and some amusement the many efforts to justify altruism by its contributions to enlightened self-interest. To see it makes more sense to justify self-interest by appeal to altruism. If anyone is valuable then I am valuable, for I am someone. As mere animals we feel ourselves as centers of the world; as thinking animals we know that we are not such centers or, if you will, that each of us is as much or as little the center as any of the others.
For me the mortality, the spatio-temporal finitude, of each of us is proof enough that the long-run purpose or meaning of our lives must radically transcend such as we are and involve something cosmic and indestructible, something superhuman and divine. This, too, seemed to me the only reasonable site 55 years ago.
In conclusion, I point to three basic topics relevant to my philosophical writings. These are the concern with logical structure, with value aspects of experience, and with the history of ideas.
Structure. All twelve “doctrines” have structural aspects more or less original with me. Thus note an ( s ) “continuum”; in (2) the idea of nonreflexive surpassability, also that of dual or binary vs. monary or one-dimensional transcendence; in ( 3) “formally exhaustive”; in ( 3) and (4) proof by elimination, also the idea of chance; in (5) “abstract-concrete”; in (6) contingency as an aspect of incompossibility among positive possibilities; in (7) beauty as mean in two dimensions; in (8) asymmetry as primary in logic; in (9) pragmatism as applied to necessary truths; in ( so) the continuity of the eternal; in ( s ) the discontinuity of the temporal; in ( so) the ethical application of the site that the concrete singulars are unit events.
Value aspects of experience. Note (1), (2), (4), (7), (12). A distinctive aesthetics and ethics are at least implied. In germ they were both in my mind prior to my training as a student of philosophy. Some rather pervasive beliefs of my contemporaries in philosophy could never have been my beliefs no matter what teachers in philosophy I might have had.
Thus, I was thoroughly convinced, before reading Croce, Whitehead, Peirce, and various others, that aesthetic principles are the concrete ones, that all experience is participation in feelings not merely one’s own, that self-interest is not the key to motivation, that individual Wills overlap and are only relatively nonidentical with each other, and that there is an inclusive spiritual unity embracing all nature and the final referent of all meaning and all value. Various forms of materialism, dualism, radical pluralism, radical monism, and positivism were henceforth excluded by intuitive and, I think I might say, phenomenological judgments which I arrived at in 1918 while serving in an army hospital. These convictions had many vague aspects, and I am still not sure that I have always “presided” them (in Peirce’s term) correctly or sufficiently. But they easily ruled out a goodly number of more or less fashionable doctrines and have given my development focus and continuity in spite of scarcely remitting efforts to subject myself to criticisms and pressures from standpoints other than my own. That certain beliefs were for me ruled out has not meant that arguments advanced for these beliefs, or against my own, were to be ignored. I have tried to give them fair hearing.
History of ideas. In my life, philosophizing to some extent preceded studying the history of philosophy. But once I had gone through that history, it became more and more natural to me to conceive philosophy as in part an imaginary debate with our philosophical and theological ancestors. But I hold that the history of philosophy should be done philosophically, and this means, for one thing, analytically, with attention to a priori logical possibilities, rather than in a merely empirical fashion. Thus, the question is not simply, what have various philosophers thought about God? say, but rather: out of the major a priori possibilities for theorizing about God, which possibilities have been held by which individuals? Who, for instance, has held that God is not in all respects immutable or free from contingency? In the nineteenth century Schelling, Fechner, and Lequier did so, but few paid attention to this fact. In the two previous centuries the Socinians were about the only ones. If historians overlooked all this, so much the worse for their standing as philosophical historians of philosophy. Both Leibniz and Spinoza refer to the Socinians in this connection, and learned men ought to have followed up these clues, as I did. For, either God (conceding his existence) is in all respects immutable or he is in some respects mutable. There was never any good ground for supposing that only the first possibility and its representatives deserve consideration. Historians, however, in effect made that supposition.
We need a fresh approach to the history of ideas. Lovejoy and Wolfson are the nearest to what I have in mind.
Source:
The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring, 1974), pp. 7-15.