Charles Hartshorne
Some Readers will feel the need for labels for the doctrines of this book1, and since such expressions as Second-Type Theism, or AR, are colorless and have no familiar meaning, while familiar labels like pantheism, supernaturalism, and the like are laden with vague and conflicting associations, I shall here discuss some labels that seem to me suitable.
Pantheism is conveniently defined as the logical contrary of pure transcendental deism (the term theism, which is more commonly used for the contrary of pantheism, suggests that the doctrine conforms to religion, really describes the theos, the God of worship, and that is open to dispute). Deism here means that God is the super-cause taken as self-sufficient, a complete being, in abstraction from any and all of his effects. God thus excludes the world; he is only its cause; in no sense is he effect, of himself or anything else. Pantheism (better, “pandeism,” for again it is not really the theos that is described) means that God is the integral totality of ordinary cause-effects, and that there is no super-cause independent of ordinary causes and effects.
God thus includes the world; he is, in fact, the totality of world parts, which are indifferently causes and effects. Now AR is equally far from either of these doctrines; thanks to its two-aspect view of God, it is able consistently to embrace all that is positive in either deism or pandeism. AR means that God is, in one aspect of himself, the integral totality of all ordinary causes and effects, but that in another aspect, his essence (which is A), he is conceivable in abstraction from any one or any group of particular, contingent beings (though not from the requirement and the power always to provide himself with some particulars or other, sufficient to constitute in their integrated totality the R aspect of himself at the given moment). Now the term which comes closest to saying all this is “panentheism,” since it distinguishes God from the “all” and yet makes him include all. The apparent paradox dissolves when we see that the “all” which is in God, yet not all of God, is the ordinary totality of actual, contingent existence, while the all which is God is that totality (stretching through infinite past time, and nearly all unknown to us) as involving, besides ordinary cases, the whole as an inclusive agent acting on its parts, further a supreme, abstract causal factor which contains no particular within itself . These distinctions make sense only when AR is assumed (hence Spinoza’s failure, who assumed mere A).
Just as AR is the whole positive content of perfection, so CW, or the conception of the Creator-and-the-Whole-of-what-he-has-created as constituting one life, the super-whole which in its everlasting essence is uncreated (and does not necessitate just the parts which the whole has) but in its de facto concreteness is created — this panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. Thus ARCW, or absolute-relative panentheism, is the one doctrine that really states the whole of what all theists, if not all atheists as well, are implicitly talking about. ARCW has no contrary (except the purely negative one of denying all cosmic conceptions and all conceptions of perfection, if not all conceptions whatever). You may contradict ARCW, but only by going from the center and sum of all meanings of “perfect” and “world” toward some half-meaning which cries aloud for its “other,” some eccentricity which calls for its opposing eccentricity. In both cases, AR and CW, one is not putting together concepts which contradict each other, but is avoiding contradiction by keeping abstract and concrete, eternal cause and de facto effects, where they belong, in relation to each other, as forming one inclusive (though not unchanging or in all ways symmetrically interdependent) being. It can even be shown that A and R are not simply two concepts, but rather two essential elements deducible from one concept; and the same is true of C and W. I cannot develop this here, but the single concept of perfection which says everything may be called Transcendental Relativity, or reflexive universal transcendence, and defined thus: T/T is the property of the self-transcender who in all general or categorical dimensions of value (not to all possible degrees) transcends all other beings. The single concept from which the cosmic ideas follow is that of “the self-changing whole which includes all other beings as its (more or less) self-changing parts.” From the perfection concept (which is a generalization of R to make it apply, so far as “other beings” are concerned, to all dimensions), AR, as a unity in duality, follows; and from the single cosmic concept, CW, or panentheism, follows. And from the religious idea of “lover of all beings” both AR and CW, as two ways of saying the same thing, follow. (Of course, all this does not follow from the mere symbols, by pure formal deduction. It follows when we consult the generic experiences which give meaning to “better than,” or “change,” or “love,” or “whole.” But the reasoning could profitably be worked out on its formal side also.) When these relations are studied, it becomes almost completely self-evident that the dynamic or self-excelling aspect of perfection is not derivative from the mere absolute — the mere excelling of others than self, the sheer maximum of value — but rather the absolute is a phase of the self-excelling excelling of all others (if it is all others, there is the maximum, since no self-excelling or non-self-excelling being can excel more others than all others, yet this is an absolute only in a certain respect). Similarly, time is not derivative from eternity, but eternity is the element of integrity in the ever expanding variety which is time. As for ordinary imperfection, non-transcendental relativity, it is inherent in T/T, but is property of the perfect only as properties of parts are possessed by their wholes. Imperfect parts cannot make an absolute whole, but they can make a super-relative whole, an R, which is abstractly absolute even though concretely self-surpassing without limit.
T/T can be called, as we have just suggested, the super-relative, for it includes absoluteness on some dimension; and on all dimensions it negates transcendence of itself by any other being, as ordinary relativity does not. T/T is also the super-absolute, for it is absolute on all closed (abstract) dimensions, on which alone absoluteness means anything, and it is self-transcendently transcendent of all on the remaining dimensions — on which the mere absolute would be nothing. Thus we explain both absoluteness and relativity, without having to posit a merely relative world that somehow has the illusion of the absolute, or a merely absolute being that somehow has the illusion at least of relativity.
Since Reflexive Transcendence is relational, it is in a manner the relativists that triumph. Is it not time for theologians to consider the logic of relations? And is it not time for logicians to discover that the problems of theology are in part at least problems of relational structure, and so not exactly meaningless? How can the logical relations of ideas like “better than” (transcendence), “all,” “self,” “other,” be meaningless?2 Yet the whole problem is there. Until theologians become logicians (on a decent, modern level of precision and generality), or until logicians become theologians, how can the three-thousand-year-old problem of God be dealt with in terms satisfactory for our culture? (For example, Russell has said that the theory of types refutes the classical concept of God. The principle of self-transcendence of transcendence without any upper limit to the self-transcendence seems indeed connected with the theory of types; the veto on the class of all classes, that is, a final “all.” But I suggest that atheism may also be guilty of an illegitimate use of “all” when it says, for example, that given any being an other superior to it is thinkable. For the universe is a being, and what could be superior to it, except itself in another stage or state? To treat the cosmic all as just one more thing involves, I am confident, just as hopeless difficulties as to treat it as all-perfect. AR perfection is just the recognition that the cosmic all is of another type, somehow incomparable, and incomparable by being more, even in terms of value, than anything else is or can be, because whatever may be, the cosmos will enrich itself with that.
Reflexive Transcendence throws some light, too, upon the idea of the Trinity. For T/T is in a manner the Father, and A and R are the Logos and Holy Spirit. This is not utterly fanciful. Part of what was said about the three persons agrees with the logic of T/T, A, and R. The three are in a sense equal, since all are necessary to God, yet T/T is the one from which the necessity of the other two can best be understood, and in this sense it begets the other two in a logical, not a temporal sense.
However, the three elements are apparently not at all “persons.” Yet there are, in a manner, distinct persons in God, though unfortunately they are neither three in number nor equal to each other. I refer to the temporal series of self-states in God. The divine personality is concretely and in part new each moment, and each new divine self sympathizes with its predecessors and its (in outline) anticipated successors. It is even true that these persons in God are immutable (though not eternal or ungenerated) for, as events, once they occur they are immortally there in the life of God. But each self is superior to all its predecessors, except in the abstract or A factor (which includes the requirement that there shall always be an R factor, a new state of self-transcendence, but includes no such state in particular) , this factor being identical in all. Thus the Trinity seems not so much one idea as several, some of which may be profoundly true, especially as compared to the idea that God is sheer unity without inner distinction, and without any intelligible relations of self-love. The “mystery” of the Trinity, object only of faith, seems less impenetrable than the mystery of the philosophical absolute which was taken as an object of reason!
While theologians and logicians (with many exceptions) tend to enforce the cruel and fallacious dilemma — either a discredited, ill-generalized, inexact logic, or the abandonment of the belief that love is the highest wisdom and the most far-reaching power — while this happens, the world shows as never befog c the need of men to be able to retain and intensify this belief, and to do so with their intelligence. not in dangerous contempt of responsible. self-critical, cooperative thinking.
Notes
1. Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism.
2. On the positivistic view that metaphysical and theological conceptions are meaningless, see my article, “Anthropomorphic Tendencies in Positivism,” Philosophy of Science, 1941. D. H. Parker’s Experience and Substance (University of Michigan Press, 1941) is an able defense and exposition of a type of metaphysics roughly similar to that expressed in this book. See also A. C. Garnett’s Reality and Value (Yale University Press. 1937); or Paul Weiss, op. cit.; or W. P. Montague. op. cit.; or the philosophical writings of A. N. Whitehead (The Macmillan Co., 1926 to 1938).
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Man’s Vision of God and the Logic of Theism, pp. 347-352.
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