Preface to Beyond Humanism (Bison Book Edition)
Charles Hartshorne
In the thirty-two years since the writing of these essays, the philosophical scene has changed in many ways. Writings by Russell, Dewey, Santayana, Carnap, and Moore are less in the center of interest; while those by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin, Strawson, Heidegger, Peirce, and (in this country at least) Whitehead are nearer the center. The influence of formal logic is perhaps greater than it was, but what Ryle calls “informal logic,” or some call “linguistic analysis,” has become still more influential. Distrust of metaphysics, except in some very attenuated form, is probably stronger than it was. So far as metaphysics in anything like “the grand manner” is done at all, it seems due in large measure to the writings of Whitehead and Peirce and the writings and teaching of Weiss and myself. The effect of John Findlay’s brilliant speculative mind is also beginning to be felt.
I hope that today I could be fairer to other points of view than my own, and more careful to avoid special pleading. Also I hope that today I have a clearer grasp of the logical structure of many of the problems. Nevertheless, I cannot find myself in sharp substantive disagreement with that former self of mine. I still view man, nature, and God in much the same way and for much the same reasons, although I think that the argument can be strengthened in certain ways. On the other hand, I am more aware of the diversity of philosophical attitudes which human life seems to make more or less inevitable. If there is such a thing as metaphysical insight, to have it is perhaps a privilege that is not extended to all. Still less can those who have it feel equally at home with any particular linguistic fashion of expressing the insight.
The chief retractions I am inclined to make are terminological. I have long ceased to call my position “pantheism,” since I hold that classical theism, classical pantheism, and what I sometimes call “panentheism” form a triad, any two members of which are about as far apart as any other two. Classical theism and classical pantheism deny contingency, and the possibility of a real increase in content, to deity, whereas my panentheism asserts of God both necessity and contingency, both immutability and openness to novelty.
Also, long ago I decided to concede the term “naturalism” to those whose views are still farther from classical theism or pantheism than mine are. God is not “natural,” if that means that he has had an origin, a beginning, or that his very existence is contingent. True, it may be held that nature as such is primordial and noncontingent, but it remains controversial what is left when we abstract from the idea of nature all those features which, in my view, have had an origin, including all empirically testable laws of nature. If supernaturalism is the view that reality has two levels—the level of contingent, generated entities and the level of whatever is necessary and ungenerated; or again the level of beings whose excellence can be exceeded by other beings and the level of the being whose excellence can be exceeded only by the being itself, and in some respects not even by itself—then I am an unabashed supernaturalist. My later writings make this clear.
There is also the methodological question. “Naturalism” means, to many, that all knowledge of reality is empirically testable. I hold that only the contingent aspects of reality are knowable in this way. In addition, while God, in my view, has contingent as well as necessary aspects, there is a radical limitation upon possible human understanding of the divine reality as contingent. God’s awareness of contingent truth is itself (as the laws of modal logic require) contingent; so that we can take our own items of probable contingent truth and say that God must have contingent knowledge of them so far as true, but in what more comprehensive, distinct, and concrete way he knows them, along with unimaginably many other items, remains beyond us.
It seems probable that many more persons now think somewhat as I do about God and the world than in 1936. Also, while metaphysical speculation as such is not very popular among philosophers, the reasons advanced against it are, for the most part, only vaguely related to my “neoclassical” metaphysics. Some of the critical responses to certain of Whitehead’s doctrines come close to constituting definite objections to that metaphysics. However, not only is White-head still widely ignored, but he is also only one extremely gifted and well equipped explorer of the general territory of “process philosophy.” The possibilities of a constructive metaphysics of process are not exhausted by Bergson, James, Peirce, and Whitehead—not even if we add Husserl and Heidegger, or go back to Schelling and Hegel.
Much of the current criticism of theism as such is directed to supposed implications which logically follow only if neoclassical concepts are not adopted. According to those concepts, God is the eminent, but never the sole, agent in what happens, even in inanimate nature. His decisions literally take their chances with the more or less free creaturely responses to him and to other creatures. The only God I think I can conceive is the one Einstein rejected, a “dice-throwing God.” It is with no sorrow that I have observed the increasing tolerance for the idea of randomness (within limits, of course). The remark, often heard, “Quantum mechanics, as it stands, may be only temporary” is hardly relevant here, since there are any number of ways in which this mechanics may prove less than the whole and exact truth, without its turning out that the remedy lies in returning to classical determinism. I see nothing but prejudice to support that anticipation. And when it is said that at worst physics only shows that we cannot know an absolute causal order determining the details of process, I am content to add: then the only good, or apparently good, reason there ever was for a strictly deterministic metaphysics is done away with, since a suitably qualified determinism has all the philosophical merits of an unqualified one, without the disadvantages which Spinoza and Kant, in spite of themselves, and Bergson, James, Peirce, and Whitehead explicitly set forth.
Essentially we still face the same issues that we did three decades ago. That we must now be more careful about what we “do with words” should only mean that we can do a better job. We still have to deal with Marxism, psychoanalysis, emergent materialism, the dispute between metaphysicians and antimetaphysicians, theists and antitheists, the relations between minds (or experiences) and physical or extended reality, or between macroscopic and microscopic entities, or the logic of the causal principle. While we talk about words, these matters do not go away—though we may in a sense go away from them. And they are, in some respects at least, too general to be scientific or empirical problems. In a broad sense they are logical. In short, problems for philosophers.
Charles Hartshorne
The University of Texas
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature, pp. vii-x.