Preface to Philosophers Speak of God
Charles Hartshorne
This work aims to present—by selections from some fifty writers ranging in time and space from Lao-tse, Plato, and Sankara to Whitehead, Berdyaev, and Radhakrishnan—the chief philosophical conceptions of deity. It also aims to aid readers in estimating the validity of these conceptions. The work is thus two things: (1) a book of readings in philosophical theology—the first of its kind—and (2) a systematic analysis and evaluation of theistic (and atheistic) ideas.
1. There are anthologies of philosophy, and of religious writings or sacred scriptures, but not of philosophical treatments of the central religious idea. Out of the vast array of writings by philosophers dealing with the nature and existence of God, sample texts (some of them not elsewhere available in English) have been chosen, representing the principal concepts of deity which a new analytic classification shows to be logically possible. By this means the material is reduced to manageable proportions, and yet no major concept is omitted. The coverage is thus relatively objective; passages are included not merely because the editors agree with them, or like them, but because, taken together, they acquaint the student with the totality of views among which, or something like them, anyone seeking a philosophical solution of the religious problem must decide. Highly skeptical or atheistic views are also included.
2. The classification of doctrines employed is shown to have historical as well as systematic significance and is made the key to an interpretation of the meaning of the historical development. Each selection is prefaced by a sympathetic introduction from which criticism has been largely excluded; but it is followed in most cases by a critical commentary devoted to the frank statement of such objections as the editors deem valid. Thus selections expressing the classical conceptions are first presented; the student is given opportunity to see the various views positively and from the inside, and yet he is not left without help in the task of comparative evaluation. In the general Introduction an argument is outlined for the superiority of one of the main types of conception, which we term “panentheism” or “surrelativism.” Its chief recent representative among philosophers is Whitehead, but we trace it back to Plato, Ramanuja, and Schelling; and something like it can be found in most of the outstanding theologians of recent times—Berdyaev, Nygren, Niebuhr, and even, to a lesser extent, Barth. The book is designed partly as a historico-systematic argument pointing to a definite conclusion.
Thus this volume is, we think, unique in two respects: in the adequacy with which man’s efforts to think rationally, or with intellectual responsibility, about deity are covered through samplings of the great texts, old and new; and in the evaluation of this historical panorama from the standpoint of certain prevalent views in current metaphysics and philosophy of religion which have not yet had time to embody themselves very extensively in historical and scholarly surveys.
What is the use of such an undertaking?
The quantity of works in which great philosophic minds have set down thoughts about deity is so vast, and these works are written in so many languages, from so many points of view, and at so many periods of rime, that a student going into a library to look into the matter for himself, to ascertain what great intellects have actually done with this problem, confronts an overwhelming task. As a result he usually contents himself with a few samples, chosen either at random or according to the religious and philosophical convictions or interests of himself or his teacher or adviser. This has two disadvantages. First, he does not discover the full range of alternatives which the toil of generations over the civilized world bequeaths to us for our acceptance or rejection. This range of alternatives, however, is precisely our chief heritage in this matter. For if we could learn what can be believed, and for what reasons or upon what arguments, and still be unable to determine what is true, then the task of religious philosophy must for us be entirely hopeless. For we would have been furnished with every philosophical resource, save that which only we ourselves can provide, namely, our own judgment. But everyone who has had philosophical experience knows that to attempt to think out for one’s self, without help from one’s ancestors, the range of possible doctrines is hardly a feasible enterprise.
The second disadvantage of the usual procedure is that the possibilities which random or prejudiced sampling of the literature will be apt to miss are likely to be important. This is a subject in which strong prejudices have nearly always been operative. The histories and comparative studies have been written with a good deal of bias. Authors of various “orthodox” allegiances, and this includes multitudes of very learned men, have done what they could to make certain posibilities (sic) for thought appear to be the possibilities. Not that they have done anything so crude as to limit the possibilities to their own tenets. This would have been too manifestly illegitimate and would not have satisfied their own or anyone’s conscience. They have done something more subtle and insidious. Not only is it usual to limit the inquiry almost entirely to our Western culture, and indeed (especially among European scholars) sometimes largely to one’s own country, but there is the even worse tendency to set up artificially limited options such as theism and pantheism, or infinite God and finite God, or immutable and mutable God—and many more. In every such case, analysis discloses that one may believe in God while being about equally far from (or near to) the positions mentioned, as customarily construed. God may, in some aspect, be infinite and, in some other aspect, finite; and the same holds with respect to the predicate “mutable” or the pantheistic predicate “coextensive with reality,” or “includes all things within his own being.” In all intellectual fields one meets the phenomenon of half-truths confronting one another, agreeing only in this: that all alike deny the whole truth, which is more subtle and many-sided than any one of them alone. When something like the whole truth is expressed, the half-truth addicts pounce upon it almost as one man with charges of compromise, evasion, or confusion. It lacks the sort of dramatic trenchancy which men so love to defend—and attack.
The obstacles to fair sampling of the history of thought which have just been outlined are inherent in the problem, and we can claim no immunity. But we have at least reflected upon these obstacles and have, we trust, overcome them sufficiently to render this work a uniquely comprehensive book of theistic meditation. We have, it is true, attempted no posture of impartiality as between various doctrines. Such a posture tends to be either an affectation or a confession of incompetence. On the one hand, if we, surveying for many years the history of theistic speculations, were able to draw no conclusion for ourselves. how could we ask students to do so? And if nothing followed from the study to which we invite them, why should they undertake it? On the other hand, if we have drawn conclusions but conceal them, it of course would follow, not so much that the student would be spared exposure to their influence, as that he would undergo this influence without warning as to its character. We propose through our Introduction to give him fair notice of the “bias” of this work.
In the choice of selections our guiding idea has been that we wish to exhibit the whole outline of what men have thought—in a philosophically disciplined way—about the central religious problem. We have also given weight to the testimony of scholars with whose philosophical or religious creeds we disagree concerning the relative importance of various thinkers. We have included, as recognized spokesmen of groups whom we have not the right to ignore, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Sankara. But we have also insisted upon a hearing for many thinkers, especially of the last hundred and fifty years, who have not wholly identified themselves with any great religious body of doctrine, but whose intellectual abilities are to be taken seriously, and who seem to us to have contributed penetrating analyses not simply duplicating earlier ones and to have achieved positive insights, partly through their comparative freedom with respect to bodies of religious doctrine. Such are Schelling, Fechner, and, in a very different vein, Feuerbach. No doubt glaring omissions, not justified by any principle, and dubious inclusions could with plausibility be charged against us. The literature is vast.
With some exceptions we have felt compelled to rely upon existing translations of non-English sources. Fechner’s great chapter xi of his Zend-Avesta, only three pages of which have previously been rendered into English (in Lowrie’s The Religion of a Scientist), seemed to us too valuable and too unjustly neglected to omit; so we have translated some twenty pages of it. The Nietzsche, Zeller, and portions of the Kant translations are also our own; while the passages from Lequier and Pfleiderer, and the admirable Fock paraphrases of Socinus, are here, so far as we know, presented for the first time in English.
Since the book is too long for thorough study in a single course (unless continued for a whole year), teachers assigning it will doubtless wish to select certain parts for emphasis. For instance, one might omit all but one or two key figures in each of the longer chapters or in Part Three. The student would thus acquire an outline knowledge of the panorama of theistic and antitheistic doctrines, while also receiving some suggestions at least of how much there remains for him to know. Obviously other plans could he followed. We-believe that the book is sufficiently rich in the variety and high quality of the included materials to be of permanent value to any serious student. He therefore need not object to the fact that its scope may exceed the needs of a single course. The selections should of course be supplemented, where possible, by further reading in the works of the authors found most significant. With this understanding the book offers a design for adult education in the subject, not merely a brief initiation into it.
In transcribing texts or existing translations, we have usually adhered to the wording, punctuation, and spelling of the authors or translators. Only a few obvious slips have been corrected. To modify punctuation in a work such as this is a complicated and, to judge by the disastrous results sometimes achieved, a hazardous undertaking. In the case of some authors who wrote the English of an earlier century, but wrote it wonderfully well, such as Hume or George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans, who so brilliantly and eloquently translated Feuerbach), one hesitates to make any changes (all the more because the first-mentioned of these has been sadly mutilated by the sense-destroying punctuation of one of his modern editors).
Source:
Charles Hartshorne and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, pp vii-x.