Preface to Creativity in American Philosophy
Charles Hartshorne
This is the second of two volumes dealing with the history of philosophy, especially of metaphysics. The first, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers, discusses some thirty European philosophers, from Democritus to Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. In both volumes I try to learn and teach truth about reality by arguing, in a fashion, with those who in the past have sought such truth. Admittedly, the other party to the argument is in most cases not there to reply; but scholarly care and imagination can to some extent give him a voice. I try to avoid the straw-man fallacy. My models here are Peirce and Whitehead. They did not, as some do, waste their own and their readers’ time by attacking never existent (often rather stupid) opponents. They objected to views that had really been held by intelligent people. I try to do likewise, without, however, always documenting my sources. These books are written to show not my learning but my understanding, the understanding of a reflective student for more than sixty years of speculative philosophy through its twenty-five centuries in the West (and to some extent in Asia also). I believe one cannot do justice to metaphysical issues by considering only one’s contemporaries. There are gains in the history of philosophy, but also losses. Changes in intellectual fashions have their capricious aspects. Intellectual history serves as storehouse of old ideas and laboratory for testing what seem to us new ones, as we try to imagine what earlier thinkers might have said about them.
This book can be read independently but will gain in significance if read in connection with its more comprehensive predecessor, which gives a background for it. Neither book is merely historical or merely systematic. My effort throughout my career has been to think about philosophical, that is, essentially a priori or metaphysical, issues, using the history of ideas as a primary resource.
“Creativity” in the book’s title is intentionally ambiguous. The word refers, first, to the originality of philosophers in the United States of America and even in the British colonies that preceded them. The implication is that these philosophers were better than mere disciples or imitators of Old World philosophers. The word refers, second, to a major theme in our philosophical tradition, creativity itself as a philosophical category of cosmic significance. True enough, Bergson, Cournot, and Berdyaev in France, Varisco in Italy, and Fechner in Germany have had versions of the idea; but nowhere has the topic been more persistently and searchingly investigated than in this country (Peirce, James, W. P. Montague, Dewey, Whitehead). I am convinced that this concept is an unsurpassed, though long neglected, key to many philosophical problems and their history.
In the first nine chapters I consider those of our philosophers who have contributed most directly and powerfully to the development of a philosophy of creativity—sometimes, as in the case of Edwards, partly by arguing with unusual vigor against one or more of its presuppositions. In the remaining chapters I consider writers who seem interesting and relevant, though in less central ways, to the theme. Ten of the thirty-two writers mentioned in the table of contents are still living, but all were born either before the twentieth century or in one of its first four decades. I have omitted some important philosophers whose work has been primarily in ethics (for example, Charles Stevenson, John Rawls) or in aesthetics (DeWitt Parker, Monroe Beardsley). Also some philosophers whose training was in other countries (Rudolf Carnap, John Findlay—a superb writer and thinker), with the exceptions, justified by the unique extent to which they learned from and became influential in American philosophy, of Whitehead and Tillich. Perhaps another exception should have been Gustav Bergmann. The writers dealt with in chapters 1-9 include all but one (Santayana) of Max Fisch’s “six classical American philosophers.” Santayana (Chapter 16) I consider somewhat marginal to the main line of development of metaphysics in this country.
With Max Fisch I treat Whitehead as American, although Anglo-American is more accurate. But it was an American university, Harvard, that gave this mathematician, physicist, and logician the opportunity he needed to devote himself full time to reading, teaching, and writing philosophy. England, like Europe generally, has been too much given to exclusive specialization to afford Whitehead this opportunity. Whitehead gladly accepted his new role as philosopher among our philosophers. He stopped reading physicists and gave all his attention to philosophers. He related himself to our traditions, and in fact they were more congenial to his speculative imagination than the British tradition, Ockham to Moore and Russell, could reasonably be said to be. The British neglect of Whitehead’s philosophical work confirms this judgment.
Chapters 2, 4, 7 are slightly revised versions of Lowell Lectures given in Emerson Hall, Harvard University, in October, 1979. Sixteen and one-half chapters (2-4, 8, 11, 14A, 15, 17, 18, 20-27) and parts of most of the others are here published for the first time.
The reader will find that I combine hearty enthusiasm for the philosophical traditions of my country with sharp partial disagreement with nearly all their representatives. A youthful admiration for Emerson, Thoreau, Royce, and James partly explains the enthusiasm; the discipline of my Harvard training (1919-1923), study abroad (1923-1925), exposure (as editor) to the writings of Peirce (1925-1933), association as an instructor and research fellow at Harvard with Whitehead (1925-1928) and with critical colleagues in philosophy, theology, and science at the University of Chicago (1928-1955) partly explain the form taken by the disagreements. My thinking is somewhat akin to that of Peirce and Whitehead; but I have learned much also from Emerson, Royce, James, Lewis, Dewey, Carnap, and many others, including the very intelligent Episcopal clergyman who was my father. Finally, my thinking is my own. Metaphysics (and it is metaphysics—pace Heidegger—with which this book chiefly deals) cannot be divested entirely of a personal element, though metaphysicians should, and I do, strive valiantly to transcend the merely personal. Always the degree of success or failure in this is for others to judge.
I feel gratitude to the writers-editors of certain books of readings in “American Philosophy,” meaning philosophy as represented by citizens of the United States of (North) America or their colonial predecessors. These writers-editors include W. G. Muelder, Laurence Sears, and A. V. Schlabach (The Development of American Philosophy, Houghton Muffin, 1940, 1960); P. R. Anderson and M. H. Fisch (Philosophy in America, D. Appleton-Century, 1939). Fisch’s Classic American Philosophers (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951) was also very helpful. These three books, and several departments of philosophy that asked me to teach courses on American philosophy greatly helped me to appreciate our national heritage in this branch of inquiry. In general I am inclined to regard books of readings as the most valuable introductions to a subject. Every time I think of Benjamin Rand, philosophical librarian at Harvard for many years, I feel gratitude for his selections from the history of philosophy. It is fine to go back to complete works by the great ones; but life is short, considering what a vast mass of such works there are in which we might find stimulating ideas. When I was suddenly asked to teach aesthetics for the first time, having never before thought of doing so, it was the books of readings that made a quick initiation into the heart of the subject possible.
Although the order of topics is largely chronological, I do not call this book a history. For a history in the standard sense consult A History of Philosophy in America, Vols. 1, 2, by Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey (New York: Capricorn Books, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977). It gives massive information about sources, in the Old World and the New, of the philosophical ideas dealt with. Consulting this book will have the advantage for a reader of my works that its authors’ biases or blind spots, which all of us inevitably have, will be very different from mine. Thus in dealing with Emerson, Flower and Murphey manage to miss entirely the idea of “compensation,” of which he was so fond (at least the word does not appear in their index), and they do not mention his theological determinism, which I show to be central (and unfortunate) in his thinking. Their readers will learn a great deal about the contexts and influences under which our philosophers have developed their thoughts. But when it comes to the question of truth (in a more than historical sense) of these thoughts, their readers will be largely on their own. Evaluations bearing on this are few. They interpret philosophies sympathetically and largely as their representatives saw them. I emphasize the distinction between what we now have reason to see as ill judged or badly mistaken in their writings and what we now have reason to see as well judged and a likely approximation to the truth about God or nature. I try to present the story of philosophy as a gradual sifting of possible views, a process that tends to eliminate cruder errors and thus constitutes a sort of testing laboratory for those ideas that empirical science logically could not falsify and therefore cannot in the proper sense verify. These are the metaphysical ideas, whose truth consists in making sense and whose falsity consists in not doing so.
The philosophers dealt with in chapters 1-7 did their work before I came to exist (at least as a philosopher); but those discussed in the remaining chapters were all, except for Santayana and Nozick, personal acquaintances, and with all I have been to some extent in intellectual dialogue. They form a somewhat arbitrary selection from the large number of American colleagues whose work has given me food for thought during the six decades that I have been a conscious member of the community of philosophers.
As usual my readers and I benefit from the superior editing of Dorothy C. Hartshorne, who in the last hundred days has found it possible to make perhaps five hundred (or is it a thousand?) valuable suggestions for turning mediocre into good, good into excellent, unclear into clear, or clear into very clear writing, and in this way to enable me to achieve in two books a higher level of communication than I could possibly do otherwise.
I also wish to express appreciation of the encouragement of Mr. William Eastman, one of many who have been students of mine and who later proved important for the world and, incidentally, for me.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy, pp. xi-xv.
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