Charles Hartshorne
Although the treatment of topics is roughly chronological, this book is not, in any usual sense, a history of philosophy, whether designed to introduce beginners to the subject or to give advanced students a detailed and rounded exposition of what great philosophers were trying to do in and for their own age, and how they did it. My work does not attempt to rival B. A. G. Fuller’s Students’ History of Philosophy; or Copleston’s many volumes or J. H. Randall’s three; Julián Marías’s history or John Passmore’s A Hundred Years of Philosophy. (We are all indebted to such scholars, who will probably have more quarrels with me than I with them.) The closest parallels to my book that have occurred to me and, independently, to a reader of the manuscript, are Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (or his book on Leibniz) and Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. There is also some analogy to Croce’s “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel,” except that I am trying to evaluate the continuing relevance of many philosophers.
My aim has been to discuss not what the great philosophers did for their ages but what they can do for ours, what we can learn from them in solving our philosophical problems. Since disagreement is chronic in philosophy, this is a daring and perhaps presumptuous undertaking. What I offer is an inquiry into the way some great philosophers furnish an illuminating background for a type of philosophy that is distinctive of this century, the most thoroughly worked out and brilliant example of which is the system of Whitehead. I am not a Whiteheadian; indeed one who should know terms me “at most semi-Whiteheadian,” (There is a dissertation arguing that I am primarily a Peircean—a follower of Charles S. Peirce.) Substantial parts of my system of ideas came from still other sources. But Whitehead is for me the most recent of the great speculative philosophers.
A primary conviction pervading the book was derived in the first instance from William James’s ‘The Dilemma of Determinism,” strengthened and generalized years later by reading Peirce’s “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” Another conviction, that matter is only a form of mind (and yet more concrete than Bishop Berkeley’s “ideas”), came to me when no particular philosopher holding this view occupied my thoughts. My philosophical acceptance of theism also came before I knew about Peirce or Whitehead. On the other hand, the classical theism that I combat at intervals in the book was a doctrine I never have accepted; and the form of theism that I finally adopted was a clarification of what my own father, an Episcopal clergyman, had believed about God before I was born, though I was not conscious of this relationship while working the matter out.
What all this means is that there is something of a time-spirit or climate of opinion of our age. Western twentieth-century thought has produced a new form of speculation. With all the contrasts, there are family resemblances among a number of writers whose work falls between about 1860 and today (1981). To take a striking example:
So far as philosophical theology is concerned, Nicolas Berdyaev’s thought (see chapter 2 of his The Destiny of Man) is remarkably close to Whitehead’s. Yet neither seems to have influenced the other. The backgrounds of these two writers are vastly different. Four different countries are involved. (Varisco in Italy introduces a fifth. India and Pakistan could also be brought in.) Another example: Einstein’s “God does not throw dice” would have been much at home in the age of Newton, Leibniz, and Spinoza; but an engineer and inventor I know replied, “Of course God throws dice; to have free creatures is to take a chance on what they may do.” Berdyaev and Whitehead would agree. And many physicists now reject strict determinism. But Peirce and several French philosophers did so about a century ago.
My criteria for truth in philosophy are of course my own, but they are more or less shared with many others, living and dead—which does not dispose of those who disagree, but may make this book of some importance. I take ‘metaphysics’ to be the central concern of philosophy, meaning by the term the search for “universal and necessary truths of existence.” The truths of mathematics and formal logic, as many now interpret them, are only hypothetically necessary: “If this, then necessarily that,” An unconditionally necessary truth affirming existence is one whose denial does not make coherent sense. For example, “Something exists.” Not only would it be absurd to say that this is false, but it is, in a more subtle and complicated way, absurd to say, “There might have been nothing.” One can derive endless absurdities once this proposition is allowed. At any rate I am not alone in taking this position. There are at least three others: Jonathan Edwards, a theologian of Colonial America, Milton Munitz, an agnostic of our era, and Henri Bergson, the influential French philosopher of recent times.
I believe that Plato and Aristotle would have said the same. Opponents of metaphysics as such might have various objections to make here; but at least I have located my subject matter, which is, the necessary and therefore eternal aspects of reality, in contrast to the contingent aspects, those which come to be and might have failed to do so—for example, your existence or mine, or the existence of the human species or of hydrogen atoms, or the validity of at least some of the laws of nature. But not, as we shall see, the existence of God, which is either impossible or necessary, but not possibly contingent.
To accuse a philosopher of missing the truth (as I frequently do in this work) is not to fault his intelligence or deny his genius, and this for several reasons. First, there are some mistakes stupid or mediocre minds are incapable of making. The defects in Leibniz’s Monadology or Spinoza’s Ethics are paradigm examples of this. Second, philosophers are not aiming at pure, objective truth and nothing else. They are, consciously or not, trying to remedy troubles, partly theoretical but also partly practical, in their society or their personal lives. Thus Leibniz was trying to reconcile Protestants and Catholics. (Today we have the even more dangerous antagonism between Marxist and non-Marxist societies.) Third, each new cultural situation makes it easier than before to see some aspects of philosophical truth and may make it harder to see others. It also makes some aspects more, and others less, relevant. What is a mistake so far as mere truth is concerned may at the same time be a brilliant and useful error in its time and context and in that sense a success, not a failure. In this book I am not primarily emphasizing this consideration.
Every philosopher experiences the One Universe of humanity, nonhuman nature, and (some of us think) God. Aspects of reality denied or greatly understressed by a philosopher are not likely to be entirely without expression in his works. Subtle and industrious scholarship can find hints of these understressed, perhaps verbally denied, aspects. In this book I am mainly concerned with what a writer effectively formulates. I do not limit his wisdom to his effective formulations, but only (to some extent) his relevance to my or our present quest for wisdom. Too much historical subtlety in that quest can I believe be counter-productive.
Readers sympathetic to positivism, the radical rejection of metaphysics as such, may feel that their position has been neglected. The chapters on Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger are relevant here, In my book “Creativity in American Philosophy” (to be published later), discussions of Quine, Carnap, and some others will bear on the subject. Positivists since Comte have done much of their work and had much of their influence in the United States. For many years Carnap was my colleague.
The prestige of science, with its observational method, gives positivism a certain advantage. Yet the great scientists have not been positivists. Their belief in the orderliness of reality preceded empirical testing, and indeed for two millennia it amounted to a metaphysical dogma of determinism. Absolutizing the concept of order, like absolutizing the concept of freedom with its implication of some disorder and independence of others, destroys both concepts. The principle of contrast is valid with such extremely general conceptions. The metaphysical beliefs, which are not empirically testable, answer questions about what assertions follow from the meanings of conceptions so ultimate or general that anything conceivable is a special case of them. The negative test in metaphysics is not whether counterinstances can be observed, but whether observing them is conceivable. (Even God could not conceivably observe total nonexistence.) Hence, to repeat; that something exists is true not only empirically but necessarily or a priori. So is whatever is entailed by the something; for example, some mixture of order and disorder,
As has already been implied, this book is one of two volumes dealing with the history of Western philosophy. The other, dealing with American philosophy, will I trust be published soon. Since I am an American (Norte Americano), intensively familiar with my country’s philosophical traditions, the separation in subject matter of the two volumes will not be absolute. This will perhaps be most noticeable in chapter 14,
Twenty-five of the chapters in this volume are here published for the first time. These include all the chapters on Greek philosophy and two of the three on medieval philosophy.
The title of this book occurred to me at the outset of my career, but it is only recently that I have felt able to write what the title seems to suggest. It is open to the comment, “By ‘insights’ the author can only mean views he agrees with and by ‘oversights’ views he is sorry not to find in the philosophers considered.” I have at least one advantage over these philosophers: I have had, or taken, better opportunities to know their views than they had or took to know mine, or even, in most cases, anything much like mine. Where I differ from the great ones of the past or present I generally do so with the help of other great ones, living or dead. Courage for individual “deeds of daring” (Wolfson) should be balanced by a serious search for consensus.
Although this book gives a rather personal interpretation of intellectual history, I have made more effort than the limited documentation may seem to show to avoid mistakes in attributing views to other philosophers. Some further autobiographical remarks may be helpful. From an early age, but especially since I began my studies at Harvard as a Junior. I have tried to use the minds of many other philosophers, living and dead, in my own thinking. My interest in Whitehead is simply the most pronounced, and a somewhat late, instance of a habit of trying to absorb philosophical wisdom where I could find it. It happened that my metaphysical views as already formed harmonized rather largely with those I found in Whitehead (after two years of postdoctoral study in Europe). I also found in him great stores of scientific knowledge that I lacked and a manifest power of reformulating metaphysical issues similar to that of Bergson, Peirce, and Leibniz, but in most respects more in accord with the intellectual resources of this century. Whitehead took seriously many of the philosophers I took in the same way, he reacted to many of those I have reacted to: Russell, my teachers W. F. Hocking and R. B. Perry; also Bergson, James, Dewey, Bradley, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Christian theologians, Plato, the Pre-Socratics. He was, as I was, a highly critical but not scornful heir of Christianity. He was not a “humanist” in the sense of almost identifying the cosmos with the human species; the vast remainder of nature was really there for him, as it was for me; yet he thought, as I had long thought, that we have no positive alternative to interpreting nonhuman nature by analogy with human nature. Nature (pace some quantum physicists) is there with or without us; but our own natures are for us the basic samples of reality, the one kind of reality that is most fully accessible to our understanding. In these and other ways it was quickly obvious to me that I would be a fool not to make great use of Whitehead’s work.
My relations to Peirce (of whose writings I was an editor) were similar. But compared to him Whitehead had important advantages, partly thanks to having a much more advanced physics and biology to furnish illustrations of metaphysical generalities. Nevertheless, if (stretching matters) I am a “Whiteheadian,” I am, in not much lesser degree, a Peircean, strongly influenced also by Emerson, Royce, Bergson, James, Leibniz, Plato, and indeed many others. I am a ‘process philosopher” or “neoclassical” metaphysician in a tradition whose greatest founders are not, but happily most of whose proponents are, still alive.
Of my previous writings the most historical have been Philosophers Speak of God (with W. L. Reese) and Anselm’s Discovery; also my Aquinas Lecture, Aquinas to Whitehead: Seven Centuries of Metaphysics of Religion (Milwaukee: Marquette University Publications, 1976).
Plato’s belief that the young are scarcely capable of much depth or wisdom in speculative philosophy seems in accord with the history of the subject. A long maturity dedicated to the task is almost a necessity. This book is a product of such prolonged dedication.
“Philosophy” in the title refers primarily to Metaphysics. I agree with Kant that there is a legitimate “metaphysics of ethics” (and aesthetics) but these aspects will be subordinated in this volume. They will be given more attention in another largely completed work called “Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Golden Mean.”
In another respect this book presents a one-sided view of its subject. Metaphysics is important chiefly in two ways: in clarifying and purifying religious beliefs, and in furnishing suggestions to the sciences. In this book I stress chiefly the former aspect, though I am far from uninterested in the latter. If philosophy of science were my major field of specialization I would have paid more attention, for instance, to Einstein, Planck, or Heisenberg, or to historians of science like Kuhn (however, I incline to think Popper more nearly right), or again to the way Plato and Aristotle, in comparison to Democritus and other Pre-Socratics, were in important respects regressive, and obstacles to the development of science, through their relative lack of interest in experiment and precise observations. In much of this I agree partly with some materialistic histories of philosophy, with Karl Popper, and with that marvellous (sic) public relations man of astronomy, Carl Sagan. Only partly—for (as Popper himself holds) there is a metaphysical (as there is a mathematical) element in knowledge, and Plato and Aristotle were the great founders of the rational inquiry into this element. Plato’s appreciation of the mathematical aspect of knowledge was superior to (or at least more emphasized than) Aristotle’s but was carried too far under Pythagorean influence; Aristotle’s focus on the biological model of reality was short-circuited by his all too Platonic conviction that only the eternal can be really known or worth knowing. Both had a certain Greek contempt for becoming and contingency: that is to say, for concrete actuality, in which, as Aristotle partly saw, is all the reality and value, even of the abstract.
I see some validity in Sagan’s characterization of Athenian society with its slaves as “corrupt,” and of Plato and Aristotle as apologists for this society, in which slaves did the manipulation of things while the leisured slave-owners lost the practical sense of dealing with the physical basis of life and fell into the illusion of coming to understand nature without experimentation and detailed, accurate observation. However, humanity approaches the truth only in somewhat roundabout and uncertain steps. Nor are physical observation and experimentation the only avenues to wisdom.
The reader will note that I interpret past philosophies in the light of insights that later and recent philosophers have given us. I believe that this is at least one intelligent way to proceed. Long ago, I heard Heidegger teach the history of philosophy backward. He began with Husserl, showed how Husserl presupposed Descartes, then how Descartes utilized some scholastic ideas, how these went back to Aristotle, how Aristotle was responding to Plato and the Pre-Socratics. The moral seemed to be that the first persons to have an idea were clearest about the intuitive evidences without which the idea tends to lose much of its meaning. It was as though the Pre-Socratics were more phenomenological than Husserl (and perhaps the poets than the philosophers). This was an extreme view. I think we should look for insights, the real intuitions, wherever in poets, philosophers, or scientists they can be found. The history of philosophy should be viewed as exhibiting progress but also regression. Strawson, asked if there is progress in philosophy, replied, “Sometimes we regain lost ground.” This too is a half-truth. Bergson, James, Peirce, and Whitehead carefully consulted experience, not just the history of ideas; but they did not close their minds to that history. Later thinkers have an advantage—if they choose to utilize it.
A characteristic doctrine of our time holds that philosophical arguments seldom prove anything, the reason being that a proof is only as convincing as its premises, and that important philosophical disagreements express basic assumptions, denial of which is counterintuitive to those whose assumptions they are. Henry Johnstone has devoted a book to showing that the only valid arguments in philosophy must be against selected philosophers, employing premises and principles of method affirmed by those very philosophers.
Otherwise arguments beg the question. The late Everett Hall also wrote a book on the same subject and reached a rather similar conclusion, adding, however, the suggestion that all philosophers ought to take as basic principle that they are trying to communicate to others, not merely to express their own convictions, and therefore all should respect the requirements of communication. Students of Richard McKeon know his contention that when philosophers refute one another they are less impressive than when they expound their own views. Refutation, I have heard him say, is a “political” operation, an attempt to gain at least apparent advantage by rhetorical devices.
In this book I argue (often too briefly) with many philosophers of the past and, in doing so, I attempt to illustrate philosophical argumentation at its best, with a minimum of mere question-begging or of the straw-man fallacy. Where there is a clash of basic convictions I try to throw some light on the reason for the convictions, the cultural conditions that made them natural and the clash so difficult to overcome. I think that philosophers have often validly refuted other philosophers, but usually not exactly in the sense they thought they had. Very often the dispute is among views of which none quite makes sense or could be true as it stands. Each sees the fault in the other, none sees the fault in the self. Between impossibilities (and metaphysical mistakes are impossibilities) choice is somewhat arbitrary. Where the possible truth is not represented, each thinker fights for his own impossibility (perhaps called “paradox” or “difficulty”), as no worse (and, he wants to think, somehow really better) than the other’s impossibility. I believe that in some respects at least we can come closer to the truth than our forerunners and at least mitigate the distortions, exaggerations, one-sidednesses, of the traditional array of doctrines. This at any rate is what this book attempts to show. Every great philosopher sees some aspects of reality more clearly than those before him have done, though he may make his own new mistakes as well. Argumentation is a means of progress, at least if the ideals of clarity, honesty, and meeting the other partway in the search for common ground are respected.
To any feminist readers, of whom I hope there will be many, I wish to say that I share their objection to the use of masculine pronouns in referring to God. For some years now I have been trying to avoid this manifestation of male chauvinism, especially when stating my own views rather than those of writers with whom I disagree. However, it is not easy, since language as it now exists is against those of us who see the irrationality of the traditional view. For any lapses I may be guilty of in this respect I hereby apologize.
Two colleagues—Professors Alex Mourelatos and Louis Mackey— and a former student, Dr. James Devlin (a specialist in Aristotle, with remarkable knowledge of modern philosophy), have given criticisms that enabled me to improve parts of this book. Mourelatos read an early version of the Plato chapter, Mackey read versions of the chapters on medieval philosophy in general and on Kierkegaard. I also thank another colleague, Dr. D. M. Kellner, for expert comments on a version of the Marx essay. Devlin read the whole book and was very helpful indeed, especially on the treatment of Marx, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty. Dorothy C. Hartshorne, almost as usual, read nearly the whole of it (in spite of some months of severe though temporary illness) and showed me hundreds of places where the writing could be improved. Every reader will be in her debt.
The foregoing is far from all the expert help I have had in writing and rewriting this book. I particularly wish to thank two persons, whose names are unknown to me, but whose mixtures of severe criticisms and positive suggestions, based on an earlier version of this book, have enabled me to improve it considerably. Without one of these persons, three of the thirty chapters would not have been written at all, chapters really needed for the design of the whole. Without either of these critics a number of chapters would have been less adequate or accurate than they now are. Whether or not I ever know the identity of my benefactors, they will know, should they do much reading in the finished work, that their labors for my benefit, or the benefit of my readers, have not been in vain. Even the subtitle was suggested by one of them.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy, pp. ix- xvii.
HyC
Preface to Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers
Charles Hartshorne
Although the treatment of topics is roughly chronological, this book is not, in any usual sense, a history of philosophy, whether designed to introduce beginners to the subject or to give advanced students a detailed and rounded exposition of what great philosophers were trying to do in and for their own age, and how they did it. My work does not attempt to rival B. A. G. Fuller’s Students’ History of Philosophy; or Copleston’s many volumes or J. H. Randall’s three; Julián Marías’s history or John Passmore’s A Hundred Years of Philosophy. (We are all indebted to such scholars, who will probably have more quarrels with me than I with them.) The closest parallels to my book that have occurred to me and, independently, to a reader of the manuscript, are Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (or his book on Leibniz) and Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. There is also some analogy to Croce’s “What Is Living and What Is Dead in Hegel,” except that I am trying to evaluate the continuing relevance of many philosophers.
My aim has been to discuss not what the great philosophers did for their ages but what they can do for ours, what we can learn from them in solving our philosophical problems. Since disagreement is chronic in philosophy, this is a daring and perhaps presumptuous undertaking. What I offer is an inquiry into the way some great philosophers furnish an illuminating background for a type of philosophy that is distinctive of this century, the most thoroughly worked out and brilliant example of which is the system of Whitehead. I am not a Whiteheadian; indeed one who should know terms me “at most semi-Whiteheadian,” (There is a dissertation arguing that I am primarily a Peircean—a follower of Charles S. Peirce.) Substantial parts of my system of ideas came from still other sources. But Whitehead is for me the most recent of the great speculative philosophers.
A primary conviction pervading the book was derived in the first instance from William James’s ‘The Dilemma of Determinism,” strengthened and generalized years later by reading Peirce’s “The Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” Another conviction, that matter is only a form of mind (and yet more concrete than Bishop Berkeley’s “ideas”), came to me when no particular philosopher holding this view occupied my thoughts. My philosophical acceptance of theism also came before I knew about Peirce or Whitehead. On the other hand, the classical theism that I combat at intervals in the book was a doctrine I never have accepted; and the form of theism that I finally adopted was a clarification of what my own father, an Episcopal clergyman, had believed about God before I was born, though I was not conscious of this relationship while working the matter out.
What all this means is that there is something of a time-spirit or climate of opinion of our age. Western twentieth-century thought has produced a new form of speculation. With all the contrasts, there are family resemblances among a number of writers whose work falls between about 1860 and today (1981). To take a striking example:
So far as philosophical theology is concerned, Nicolas Berdyaev’s thought (see chapter 2 of his The Destiny of Man) is remarkably close to Whitehead’s. Yet neither seems to have influenced the other. The backgrounds of these two writers are vastly different. Four different countries are involved. (Varisco in Italy introduces a fifth. India and Pakistan could also be brought in.) Another example: Einstein’s “God does not throw dice” would have been much at home in the age of Newton, Leibniz, and Spinoza; but an engineer and inventor I know replied, “Of course God throws dice; to have free creatures is to take a chance on what they may do.” Berdyaev and Whitehead would agree. And many physicists now reject strict determinism. But Peirce and several French philosophers did so about a century ago.
My criteria for truth in philosophy are of course my own, but they are more or less shared with many others, living and dead—which does not dispose of those who disagree, but may make this book of some importance. I take ‘metaphysics’ to be the central concern of philosophy, meaning by the term the search for “universal and necessary truths of existence.” The truths of mathematics and formal logic, as many now interpret them, are only hypothetically necessary: “If this, then necessarily that,” An unconditionally necessary truth affirming existence is one whose denial does not make coherent sense. For example, “Something exists.” Not only would it be absurd to say that this is false, but it is, in a more subtle and complicated way, absurd to say, “There might have been nothing.” One can derive endless absurdities once this proposition is allowed. At any rate I am not alone in taking this position. There are at least three others: Jonathan Edwards, a theologian of Colonial America, Milton Munitz, an agnostic of our era, and Henri Bergson, the influential French philosopher of recent times.
I believe that Plato and Aristotle would have said the same. Opponents of metaphysics as such might have various objections to make here; but at least I have located my subject matter, which is, the necessary and therefore eternal aspects of reality, in contrast to the contingent aspects, those which come to be and might have failed to do so—for example, your existence or mine, or the existence of the human species or of hydrogen atoms, or the validity of at least some of the laws of nature. But not, as we shall see, the existence of God, which is either impossible or necessary, but not possibly contingent.
To accuse a philosopher of missing the truth (as I frequently do in this work) is not to fault his intelligence or deny his genius, and this for several reasons. First, there are some mistakes stupid or mediocre minds are incapable of making. The defects in Leibniz’s Monadology or Spinoza’s Ethics are paradigm examples of this. Second, philosophers are not aiming at pure, objective truth and nothing else. They are, consciously or not, trying to remedy troubles, partly theoretical but also partly practical, in their society or their personal lives. Thus Leibniz was trying to reconcile Protestants and Catholics. (Today we have the even more dangerous antagonism between Marxist and non-Marxist societies.) Third, each new cultural situation makes it easier than before to see some aspects of philosophical truth and may make it harder to see others. It also makes some aspects more, and others less, relevant. What is a mistake so far as mere truth is concerned may at the same time be a brilliant and useful error in its time and context and in that sense a success, not a failure. In this book I am not primarily emphasizing this consideration.
Every philosopher experiences the One Universe of humanity, nonhuman nature, and (some of us think) God. Aspects of reality denied or greatly understressed by a philosopher are not likely to be entirely without expression in his works. Subtle and industrious scholarship can find hints of these understressed, perhaps verbally denied, aspects. In this book I am mainly concerned with what a writer effectively formulates. I do not limit his wisdom to his effective formulations, but only (to some extent) his relevance to my or our present quest for wisdom. Too much historical subtlety in that quest can I believe be counter-productive.
Readers sympathetic to positivism, the radical rejection of metaphysics as such, may feel that their position has been neglected. The chapters on Hume, Kant, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger are relevant here, In my book “Creativity in American Philosophy” (to be published later), discussions of Quine, Carnap, and some others will bear on the subject. Positivists since Comte have done much of their work and had much of their influence in the United States. For many years Carnap was my colleague.
The prestige of science, with its observational method, gives positivism a certain advantage. Yet the great scientists have not been positivists. Their belief in the orderliness of reality preceded empirical testing, and indeed for two millennia it amounted to a metaphysical dogma of determinism. Absolutizing the concept of order, like absolutizing the concept of freedom with its implication of some disorder and independence of others, destroys both concepts. The principle of contrast is valid with such extremely general conceptions. The metaphysical beliefs, which are not empirically testable, answer questions about what assertions follow from the meanings of conceptions so ultimate or general that anything conceivable is a special case of them. The negative test in metaphysics is not whether counterinstances can be observed, but whether observing them is conceivable. (Even God could not conceivably observe total nonexistence.) Hence, to repeat; that something exists is true not only empirically but necessarily or a priori. So is whatever is entailed by the something; for example, some mixture of order and disorder,
As has already been implied, this book is one of two volumes dealing with the history of Western philosophy. The other, dealing with American philosophy, will I trust be published soon. Since I am an American (Norte Americano), intensively familiar with my country’s philosophical traditions, the separation in subject matter of the two volumes will not be absolute. This will perhaps be most noticeable in chapter 14,
Twenty-five of the chapters in this volume are here published for the first time. These include all the chapters on Greek philosophy and two of the three on medieval philosophy.
The title of this book occurred to me at the outset of my career, but it is only recently that I have felt able to write what the title seems to suggest. It is open to the comment, “By ‘insights’ the author can only mean views he agrees with and by ‘oversights’ views he is sorry not to find in the philosophers considered.” I have at least one advantage over these philosophers: I have had, or taken, better opportunities to know their views than they had or took to know mine, or even, in most cases, anything much like mine. Where I differ from the great ones of the past or present I generally do so with the help of other great ones, living or dead. Courage for individual “deeds of daring” (Wolfson) should be balanced by a serious search for consensus.
Although this book gives a rather personal interpretation of intellectual history, I have made more effort than the limited documentation may seem to show to avoid mistakes in attributing views to other philosophers. Some further autobiographical remarks may be helpful. From an early age, but especially since I began my studies at Harvard as a Junior. I have tried to use the minds of many other philosophers, living and dead, in my own thinking. My interest in Whitehead is simply the most pronounced, and a somewhat late, instance of a habit of trying to absorb philosophical wisdom where I could find it. It happened that my metaphysical views as already formed harmonized rather largely with those I found in Whitehead (after two years of postdoctoral study in Europe). I also found in him great stores of scientific knowledge that I lacked and a manifest power of reformulating metaphysical issues similar to that of Bergson, Peirce, and Leibniz, but in most respects more in accord with the intellectual resources of this century. Whitehead took seriously many of the philosophers I took in the same way, he reacted to many of those I have reacted to: Russell, my teachers W. F. Hocking and R. B. Perry; also Bergson, James, Dewey, Bradley, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, Leibniz, Christian theologians, Plato, the Pre-Socratics. He was, as I was, a highly critical but not scornful heir of Christianity. He was not a “humanist” in the sense of almost identifying the cosmos with the human species; the vast remainder of nature was really there for him, as it was for me; yet he thought, as I had long thought, that we have no positive alternative to interpreting nonhuman nature by analogy with human nature. Nature (pace some quantum physicists) is there with or without us; but our own natures are for us the basic samples of reality, the one kind of reality that is most fully accessible to our understanding. In these and other ways it was quickly obvious to me that I would be a fool not to make great use of Whitehead’s work.
My relations to Peirce (of whose writings I was an editor) were similar. But compared to him Whitehead had important advantages, partly thanks to having a much more advanced physics and biology to furnish illustrations of metaphysical generalities. Nevertheless, if (stretching matters) I am a “Whiteheadian,” I am, in not much lesser degree, a Peircean, strongly influenced also by Emerson, Royce, Bergson, James, Leibniz, Plato, and indeed many others. I am a ‘process philosopher” or “neoclassical” metaphysician in a tradition whose greatest founders are not, but happily most of whose proponents are, still alive.
Of my previous writings the most historical have been Philosophers Speak of God (with W. L. Reese) and Anselm’s Discovery; also my Aquinas Lecture, Aquinas to Whitehead: Seven Centuries of Metaphysics of Religion (Milwaukee: Marquette University Publications, 1976).
Plato’s belief that the young are scarcely capable of much depth or wisdom in speculative philosophy seems in accord with the history of the subject. A long maturity dedicated to the task is almost a necessity. This book is a product of such prolonged dedication.
“Philosophy” in the title refers primarily to Metaphysics. I agree with Kant that there is a legitimate “metaphysics of ethics” (and aesthetics) but these aspects will be subordinated in this volume. They will be given more attention in another largely completed work called “Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Golden Mean.”
In another respect this book presents a one-sided view of its subject. Metaphysics is important chiefly in two ways: in clarifying and purifying religious beliefs, and in furnishing suggestions to the sciences. In this book I stress chiefly the former aspect, though I am far from uninterested in the latter. If philosophy of science were my major field of specialization I would have paid more attention, for instance, to Einstein, Planck, or Heisenberg, or to historians of science like Kuhn (however, I incline to think Popper more nearly right), or again to the way Plato and Aristotle, in comparison to Democritus and other Pre-Socratics, were in important respects regressive, and obstacles to the development of science, through their relative lack of interest in experiment and precise observations. In much of this I agree partly with some materialistic histories of philosophy, with Karl Popper, and with that marvellous (sic) public relations man of astronomy, Carl Sagan. Only partly—for (as Popper himself holds) there is a metaphysical (as there is a mathematical) element in knowledge, and Plato and Aristotle were the great founders of the rational inquiry into this element. Plato’s appreciation of the mathematical aspect of knowledge was superior to (or at least more emphasized than) Aristotle’s but was carried too far under Pythagorean influence; Aristotle’s focus on the biological model of reality was short-circuited by his all too Platonic conviction that only the eternal can be really known or worth knowing. Both had a certain Greek contempt for becoming and contingency: that is to say, for concrete actuality, in which, as Aristotle partly saw, is all the reality and value, even of the abstract.
I see some validity in Sagan’s characterization of Athenian society with its slaves as “corrupt,” and of Plato and Aristotle as apologists for this society, in which slaves did the manipulation of things while the leisured slave-owners lost the practical sense of dealing with the physical basis of life and fell into the illusion of coming to understand nature without experimentation and detailed, accurate observation. However, humanity approaches the truth only in somewhat roundabout and uncertain steps. Nor are physical observation and experimentation the only avenues to wisdom.
The reader will note that I interpret past philosophies in the light of insights that later and recent philosophers have given us. I believe that this is at least one intelligent way to proceed. Long ago, I heard Heidegger teach the history of philosophy backward. He began with Husserl, showed how Husserl presupposed Descartes, then how Descartes utilized some scholastic ideas, how these went back to Aristotle, how Aristotle was responding to Plato and the Pre-Socratics. The moral seemed to be that the first persons to have an idea were clearest about the intuitive evidences without which the idea tends to lose much of its meaning. It was as though the Pre-Socratics were more phenomenological than Husserl (and perhaps the poets than the philosophers). This was an extreme view. I think we should look for insights, the real intuitions, wherever in poets, philosophers, or scientists they can be found. The history of philosophy should be viewed as exhibiting progress but also regression. Strawson, asked if there is progress in philosophy, replied, “Sometimes we regain lost ground.” This too is a half-truth. Bergson, James, Peirce, and Whitehead carefully consulted experience, not just the history of ideas; but they did not close their minds to that history. Later thinkers have an advantage—if they choose to utilize it.
A characteristic doctrine of our time holds that philosophical arguments seldom prove anything, the reason being that a proof is only as convincing as its premises, and that important philosophical disagreements express basic assumptions, denial of which is counterintuitive to those whose assumptions they are. Henry Johnstone has devoted a book to showing that the only valid arguments in philosophy must be against selected philosophers, employing premises and principles of method affirmed by those very philosophers.
Otherwise arguments beg the question. The late Everett Hall also wrote a book on the same subject and reached a rather similar conclusion, adding, however, the suggestion that all philosophers ought to take as basic principle that they are trying to communicate to others, not merely to express their own convictions, and therefore all should respect the requirements of communication. Students of Richard McKeon know his contention that when philosophers refute one another they are less impressive than when they expound their own views. Refutation, I have heard him say, is a “political” operation, an attempt to gain at least apparent advantage by rhetorical devices.
In this book I argue (often too briefly) with many philosophers of the past and, in doing so, I attempt to illustrate philosophical argumentation at its best, with a minimum of mere question-begging or of the straw-man fallacy. Where there is a clash of basic convictions I try to throw some light on the reason for the convictions, the cultural conditions that made them natural and the clash so difficult to overcome. I think that philosophers have often validly refuted other philosophers, but usually not exactly in the sense they thought they had. Very often the dispute is among views of which none quite makes sense or could be true as it stands. Each sees the fault in the other, none sees the fault in the self. Between impossibilities (and metaphysical mistakes are impossibilities) choice is somewhat arbitrary. Where the possible truth is not represented, each thinker fights for his own impossibility (perhaps called “paradox” or “difficulty”), as no worse (and, he wants to think, somehow really better) than the other’s impossibility. I believe that in some respects at least we can come closer to the truth than our forerunners and at least mitigate the distortions, exaggerations, one-sidednesses, of the traditional array of doctrines. This at any rate is what this book attempts to show. Every great philosopher sees some aspects of reality more clearly than those before him have done, though he may make his own new mistakes as well. Argumentation is a means of progress, at least if the ideals of clarity, honesty, and meeting the other partway in the search for common ground are respected.
To any feminist readers, of whom I hope there will be many, I wish to say that I share their objection to the use of masculine pronouns in referring to God. For some years now I have been trying to avoid this manifestation of male chauvinism, especially when stating my own views rather than those of writers with whom I disagree. However, it is not easy, since language as it now exists is against those of us who see the irrationality of the traditional view. For any lapses I may be guilty of in this respect I hereby apologize.
Two colleagues—Professors Alex Mourelatos and Louis Mackey— and a former student, Dr. James Devlin (a specialist in Aristotle, with remarkable knowledge of modern philosophy), have given criticisms that enabled me to improve parts of this book. Mourelatos read an early version of the Plato chapter, Mackey read versions of the chapters on medieval philosophy in general and on Kierkegaard. I also thank another colleague, Dr. D. M. Kellner, for expert comments on a version of the Marx essay. Devlin read the whole book and was very helpful indeed, especially on the treatment of Marx, Nietzsche, and Merleau-Ponty. Dorothy C. Hartshorne, almost as usual, read nearly the whole of it (in spite of some months of severe though temporary illness) and showed me hundreds of places where the writing could be improved. Every reader will be in her debt.
The foregoing is far from all the expert help I have had in writing and rewriting this book. I particularly wish to thank two persons, whose names are unknown to me, but whose mixtures of severe criticisms and positive suggestions, based on an earlier version of this book, have enabled me to improve it considerably. Without one of these persons, three of the thirty chapters would not have been written at all, chapters really needed for the design of the whole. Without either of these critics a number of chapters would have been less adequate or accurate than they now are. Whether or not I ever know the identity of my benefactors, they will know, should they do much reading in the finished work, that their labors for my benefit, or the benefit of my readers, have not been in vain. Even the subtitle was suggested by one of them.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy, pp. ix- xvii.
HyC