Charles Hartshorne
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century three German writers contributed significantly to speculative philosophy or philosophical theology. The first, Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817-1881), was especially influential in the United States. As Peirce said, somewhat scornfully, Lotze’s knowledge of science was that of a medical student; but still, Lotze was closer to scientific ways of thinking than Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel had been. He had a sane distrust of Hegel’s system, and in my judgment, he made some progress toward a sound metaphysics. Above all he challenged the extreme view of causal orderliness and admitted aspects of real chance. He knew that the task in metaphysics is to find a medium between extreme pluralism and extreme monism. “To be is to be related.” With this dictum the limits of pluralism are at least vaguely indicated. That relations are real aspects of reality indicates, likewise vaguely, the limits of monism. For there can be relations only if there are several or many realities, rather than just Reality beyond all terms and relations. Lotze agreed with the idealists in rejecting both dualism and materialism, but was farther from subjective idealism in the Berkeleyan sense than most idealists after Leibniz had been. In other words, he was some sort of psychicalist.
In the foregoing respects Lotze was, as Paul Kuntz (aided by Santayana’s doctoral dissertation on Lotze) has shown, a forerunner of process metaphysics.1 And Lotze did say that reality is essentially process, rather than sheer being. He also defended human freedom in the creative or causally transcendent sense. Kant had done this for the noumenal self, which is timeless and not theoretically knowable, but Lotze is not talking about that way of evading the issue. He is rejecting classical determinism as even phenomenally valid. In this respect also Lotze was ahead of his time. Although Crusius had already rejected determinism, he had gained few adherents for his position.
One of the many distinguished students of Lotze was Josiah Royce, an American from California. When I first studied Lotze’s writings, after being long familiar with those of Royce, I felt my rating of Royce going down somewhat. For it seemed to me that Royce’s system was a good deal like that of Lotze, but in some respects a regression from that model. The extreme of monism, into which Royce fell without realizing it, was better avoided by the German. Lotze would not have held, as Royce did, that what we will God wills, so that the evils of the world are divinely chosen as essential to the cosmic good. On the other hand, it was Royce who candidly asserted divine suffering, implying that if one were to speak of God as sadistic, this would be somewhat inappropriate since “masochistic” would be more in order, Both thinkers are faced with the problem of evil; but whereas Royce lays claim to solving the problem (according to Santayana, he wrestled with it “like a giant,” but without success), Lotze modestly confesses he is baffled. He knows that God is not omnipotent, as this is usually interpreted, but just what qualification is needed he does not know.
Lotze fell short of supreme greatness, he tried honestly to escape from traditional exaggerations, but without finding lucid alternatives. He defends human freedom, but without generalizing the category of creativity, as Peirce and others later did, to make it a transcendental, applicable to concrete reality on every level—human, subhuman, and superhuman. He defends the basic status of relations but without finding in the subject-object structure the key to all concrete relationships. He lacks the Whiteheadian idea of prehension—as everyone else had lacked it for two thousand years and more.
Lotze asks how causal dependence is possible. How can a change in one entity bring about a change in another entity? What relates the many realities to make a cosmos? He can only say that all the realities except God are parts of God, and thus a change in one must influence change in the other. But this is merely to make all relatedness a form or aspect of the part-whole relation. And it does not show how, in experience and reality as concretely given, this relation is exhibited as such. The simple yet until recently almost universally overlooked clue is the subject-object, or experience-experienced, structure of experiencing itself, with memory and perception revealing the past in its two forms: (1) the personal past (previous experiences in the same personal series) and (2) the impersonal past (previous events—psychically interpreted also experiences—though not in the same series). Later Peirce’s Secondness, as common to memory and perception, anticipates Whitehead’s prehension as the stone rejected by the builders upon which the entire building can rest, the form of nonsymmetrical dependence by which the world hangs together.
Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887), physicist and great initiator of experimental psychology, was also remarkable, though much less influential, as a speculative philosopher and philosophical theologian. He held that the only way to understand the world in its concreteness was to recognize in everything something analogous, however closely or remotely, to what we directly experience in ourselves. In this way only can we transcend the merely relational or structural, nonqualitative view of reality, which is all that physics or chemistry, merely as such, can give us. The conception of a world consisting only of “primary qualities” (not really qualities, mere structures, relational patterns) Fechner called the “night view” of reality, while the psychical or analogical interpretation gives the “day view.” The latter restores to our world picture something like what we experience as secondary qualities, that is, genuine qualities rather than mere relations.
Fechner distinguished two forms of psychicalism—the monadological and the synechological. Monadological psychicalism (influenced by Leibniz) looks to the imperceptibly small as the singular psychical constituents in most of physical nature; for example, the atoms or cells. Synechological psychicalism looks to larger entities; animals, trees, stars, and planets. These are all included in the divine consciousness. A botanist objected to Fechner’s attribution of awareness to trees on the ground that the dynamic unity of action in a tree is too slight to justify this attribution. Whitehead’s dictum “a tree is a democracy” is his picturesque way of making the point. There are similar objections to the idea of the earth or the sun as a sentient individual. Synechological psychicalism has, so far, not proved persuasive in comparison to monadological.
To use the term “monad” in this context has the disadvantage that Leibniz’s monadology suggests an extreme pluralism (noninteraction among monads). Fechner, like Lotze, was envisaging a moderate pluralism or moderate monism. An extreme pluralism has seldom appealed to German thinkers, however much it seems to have appealed to many British philosophers, as early as Ockham and as late as Bertrand Russell and H. H. Price.
In his theology Fechner’s speculations were at their best. His deity is not perfect in the sense of timelessly complete, but in the sense of an inclusive, ideally and everlastingly progressive reality, constantly enriched by each new creature in the world. God is unsurpassable by others but is self-surpassed in each new moment of creation. Though beyond rivalry, the divine is not beyond growth. Becoming is real, even for the divine awareness. It is genuine creation.
Why is there evil? Here Fechner is close to the neoclassical doctrine. The divine will does not simply decide what happens; the creatures are all self-decided in some degree. God’s decisions determine general directions but not details. Making use of his insight as a psychologist, Fechner points out that in us volition presupposes impulse; our decisions do not produce these impulses but encourage or discourage their continuance or guide their particular expressions. If we are to use analogical terms like “will” of deity, we should also admit something in the divine life analogous to impulse. Accordingly, Fechner speculates, what is volition in us, who are not simply outside the divine life, is impulse in God, who encourages, discourages, or otherwise influences the forms of expression of these volitions (as they are in us) or impulses (as they are in God). The evils in the world are results of creaturely not divine decisions, And since Fechner generalized freedom or decision-making power to apply to all singulars in reality, the solution is general.
In principle the Fechnerian view seems in some aspects still acceptable. It is one of the increasingly clarified efforts in history to work out the implicit Platonic scheme: self-moving soul as the motor in all change. But let us now look again at the synechological question. If impulse in God is volition in the creature, then, analogously, impulse in us is volition, or striving in some lesser creatures. Why not in our cells? And so we need to look to the imperceptibly small, after all.
In Fechner, as in Lotze, there is no clear theory of how the past influences the present. That memory is part of this influence he does see but not that and how perception is the other part.
Neither Lotze nor Fechner clearly analyzes becoming into a sequence of creations. Becoming is taken as continuous in a sense in which definite singular instances are not to be found. Thus definite subjects for subject-to-other-subject relations in memory or perception are out of the question, and the entire analysis is incurably vague. This defect persists in Peirce and Bergson and was overcome only by Whitehead. It can be held that the first clear analysis of change as an aspect of creation was given by Whitehead in his Process and Reality. Buddhism, and the views of Heraclitus, Hume, Peirce, and Bergson, can be regarded as anticipants, but none of them are as definite, sharply explicated, and yet as reasonably close to common sense, concerning the way in which belief in causal efficacy and a realistic view of experience are preserved in the philosophical account.
Lotze does not, but Fechner does, definitely attribute change to the divine life. By asserting the absolute immutability of deity, Lotze inherits all the customary difficulties, including that concerning divine knowledge and human freedom. Both men see that the evils in the world are forms of disorder and that the reason for the disorder is the multiplicity of self-active, self-determining “souls” (in a generalized sense). However, it is Fechner who more fully generalizes this idea, Lotze sees most of nature as purely “mechanical” in its action. Both thinkers regard as unnecessary a final dualism of mind and mere matter and look to mind rather than matter as the sample reality whose principles are to be generalized to cover all the forms of existence. To this extent they are definite forerunners of neoclassical metaphysics or process philosophy.
Of the two, Fechner seems by far the greater intellect. His ideas are more incisively original and better generalized. His greatest mistake was to exaggerate the dynamic unity of things like trees and heavenly bodies and neglect the evidence, apparent long ago to the Greek atomists, for the singular activity of imperceptibly small constituents of nature. His view of trees and planets was indeed “romantic.” But, as I am fond of remarking, the “pathetic fallacy” is a danger of which the prosaic or apathetic fallacy is the opposite counterpart. Reality is not as dull as many sober souls imagine. One scientist recently remarked, “Nature is stranger than we think. Perhaps it is stranger than we can think.” “Feelings of atoms” or cells are strange enough; but they may fit the evidence better than feelings of planet earth, or of the oak tree beside my house, which may have been alive when the Pilgrims first crossed the Atlantic.
Perhaps one reason why William James, though attracted by Fechner’s vision of the world, rejected (or at least did not decisively affirm) panpsychism was the implausibility of the synechological form of the doctrine. Another reason was James’s mistaken idea that Fechner attributed timeless omniscience to his deity. Here James simply did not know the author he was discussing. Perhaps he never read the great chapter (99 pages) in Zendavesta “Gott und Welt,” where the conception of divine change is unambiguously asserted.2
And if James read Fechner inadequately, philosophers in general seem not to have read him at all. After all he was a psychologist, wasn’t he?
Of German professional theologians in the nineteenth century it was Otto Pfleiderer (1839-1908) whose views came the closest to matching the insights of Fechner.3 Although classed as an Hegelian, he wrote with a clarity and sobriety one (or at least the one writing this) seeks in vain in Hegel. Perhaps it was from Hegel that Pfleiderer learned that mere eternity, by itself and apart from temporal process, would be an empty “abstraction”; hence we must admit “a temporal alterability in the content of the divine knowing and acting, despite the eternal immutability characterizing his essence and the form (of the laws and purposes) of his thinking and willing.” Here is quite clearly the idea of dual transcendence. Again, the ubiquity of deity “does not prevent us from thinking of the relation of God to the entire physical world as analogous to that of the human mind to a physical organism.” Back to Plato’s “ideal animal!” Pfleiderer definitely rejects the theory of “omniscience as . . . immutable awareness of temporal occurrences. . . . Only in distinguishing successive states of consciousness can God be aware of the eternity of his essence . . . Foresight of the future must be distinguished from knowledge of the present and must be thought to refer not to the accidents of the particular but rather to the essential features of the universal, so that it coincides with the purposive ideas of the world-ordering wisdom.”
While such ideas were being entertained in Germany, in France Jules Lequier (1814-1862) was working out his view of human freedom as producing divine change and of the future as open even for God.4 Somewhat later, in Italy, Varisco (1850-1933) and in India the Islamic thinker (influenced by Bergson) Iqbal (1877-1938) had what may be regarded as forms of process theology.5 Peirce in the United States had in the meantime inconspicuously hinted at something similar.6 And so, around the world, the old varieties of theism and pantheism began to give way to a new form, a form that can be read into Plato but that the Middle Ages and most early modern thought did not find there. The Whiteheadian distinction between what, in God, is “primordial,” independent, and immutable and what is “consequent,” dependent, and in perpetual process of further becoming is an idea that, in more or less clear forms, has from Schelling on been dawning upon intellectual mankind. In Whitehead’s system it was given systematic foundations and in important respects additional clarity. Once more, however, I feel called upon to salute the Socinians, who saw some of the most essential points more than three centuries ago. And where, even now, is the encyclopedia or history that will tell us this?7 Such is the mixture of alertness and deep sleep that is human scholarship.
Notes
1. George Santayana, Lotze’s System of Philosophy (Bloomington/London: Indiana University Press, 1971). Ed. by Paul Grimley Kuntz.
2. For a translation of substantial portions of Fechner’s essay see Hartshorne and Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1953, 1963, 1976), pp. 243-254.
3. Ibid., pp. 269-71. Pfleiderer may have been influenced by the Scottish lawyer John Erskine, whose theological writings of a century and a half ago show a remarkable approach to a doctrine of dual transcendence. Pfleiderer called Erskine’s work “the best contribution to dogmatics that British theology has produced in the present century.” I owe this reference to Philip Devenish of Notre Dame.
4. Ibid., pp. 227-230.
5. Ibid., pp. 271-273; 294-297.
6. Ibid., pp. 225-269.
7. Ibid., pp. 225-227.
Source: Charles Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy, pp. 246-253.
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