Charles Hartshorne
As man looks out upon the world, he sees entities which he regards as “below” but akin to himself — the animals; other entities still farther below, yet remotely akin to him — the plants; and finally, two kinds of entity apparently so different from human beings that they seem not relatively but absolutely non-human — inorganic objects on the one hand, and the universe as a whole on the other. The inorganic objects we can hardly think of as equal to ourselves in importance, but they seem more alien than inferior. The status of the universe is even more ambiguous. As composed mostly of the inorganic, it seems either alien or else utterly inferior; but it includes organic parts as well and is, in size and variety of parts, the greatest of all the realities manifest to us. On the other hand, it may be questioned whether the universe is to be regarded primarily as the sum of all individuals or as itself an individual or superindividual.
Thus there seem to be two great classes of existents: organisms, which form a scale from “low” to “high”; and “inorganisms” (if one may coin the word), which cannot readily be put upon this scale. There are good reasons, however, for thinking that the inorganisms are simply aggregates of parts which are themselves organisms. Molecules, atoms, and electrons all show more analogy of behavior to animals than do sticks and stones, liquids, or gases. The constituents of inorganic masses may then after all belong on the scale of organic being, but they come below what are ordinarily described as organisms. And though it is difficult to locate plants on the scale, this difficulty can be mitigated by considering the typical plant as rather a colony of cells than as a single organic individual. As for the universe, it cannot be held obvious that it is not an organism, since the universal laws of nature are its modes of organization. It is indeed arguable that the universe is incomparably the most organized of all things.
Thus it is a reasonable view that all things, so far as they are individuals rather than aggregates, fall upon a single scale (allowing for parallel branches, such as the races of man), running from the least particle of inorganic matter to the great universe itself. Now the questions for philosophy —which in this chapter can be discussed only in outline —are these: What are the variables of this scale; that is, the properties which entities higher in the scale possess in greater degree than those lower in it? In what sense are there “local” variables, that is, variables in terms of which entities in one section of the scale can be compared, but not entities from other sections? For instance, ability to speak English varies from one human being to another, but no difference between frogs and worms can be stated in this way. In what sense are there cosmic variables applying to all members of the scale, and how are these related to the local variables?
Several considerations limit the assumption of local variables. First, even for the lowest members of the scale a logically complete description must be possible. For instance, we must not say of even the lowest entities that they have relations but no qualities; for relations must relate something, and this something must have a nature, must have a quality. Quality is accordingly a category with universal range. Thus a minimal set of categories or variables must be cosmic. This minimal set will apply also to the universe as a whole in so far as this is one entity. Second, though this point will seem highly debatable to some, the local variables must somehow be expressible in terms of wider variables. Ability to speak English is clearly a special case of ability to communicate through signs, and this latter ability is in some slight degree common to the higher animals at least. Moreover, whatever local variables appear in the evolution of species, the “potentiality” of these variables must have pre-existed in cosmic variables which did not emerge. Or, if this potentiality seems verbal only, there is still another argument. The emergent local variable differs from other local variables, and not anyhow but in a determinate way. Now something must measure the difference between the new local variable and other variables, must indicate the extent of the likeness and difference involved. Only a more inclusive, ultimately a cosmic, variable can furnish such a measure. Some of those who talk of “emergent evolution” forget this comparative meaning of variables. They think that the qualities of things need not themselves have quality. But in fact, red differs from orange or gray from black to a determinate extent. (In the latter case the common variable is brightness.) The idea that quality need not be comparative is really the idea that it may be an absolutely private, local affair. But the fact that in a given locale of the cosmos there is a given quality is a public and cosmic fact, not a merely private one. Fact is by definition public, hence whatever can be a fact is comparative, and the cosmic variables are the measures of all fact, the definition of “being.” What, then, are these variables?
One thing is clear: they must be variables with an extraordinary range of “values.” In fact, this range must be strictly infinite, in whatever sense or senses this word has a meaning. For the differences among all possible things must be statable as differences among values of the cosmic variables. Thus the breadth of the variables is that of the whole universe of what is and what might be. Surely this universe is not finite, since by finitude we can only mean a restriction upon its universal scope. So we conclude that every cosmic variable is one which has an infinite range.2
Is the converse equally true, that every variable with an infinite range is cosmic? It might seem that even a local variable could be infinite in some sense. The possibilities of variation in human nature are infinite in number; no finite number of persons could exhaust these possibilities. But this infinitude is one of subdivision of a range of values, not of the extent of the range. There are upper and lower limits of human nature on each of the cosmic variables. No man can live without breathing (I do not stop to try to state this in cosmic terms), nor can any man directly intuit wireless waves. Thus variables infinite in the number of their possible values may still be quite finite in scope. But a variable infinite in scope could only, so far as I can see, be a cosmic variable. If you will, it is tautology to say so. “Cosmic” and “ infinite” mean the same thing. Nevertheless, each term makes more explicit a part of the meaning which we intuitively intend by both words.
Before we come to our question — What variables are cosmic, absolutely infinite in range? — we must face the objection that such a range would imply emptiness of all definite meaning. Do we not define a thing by contrast with something else, and must not all-inclusive variables, since all contrast is within them, be absolutely neutral and colorless, equivalent to bare “being”? If this be so, philosophy is indeed a waste of time, for concepts are philosophical only if they are universal, cosmic. But the truth is that a variable is not a mere common element among all its values, to be conceived by abstracting from them. To understand what sensation is, we should not try to abstract from all particular sensations and see what is left. Nothing would be left. What we should do is to look for the continuity (which is not bare identity) among sensations by which we can pass insensibly from one to another, as from red to yellow through orange — in fact from any color sensation to any other. It may appear that we could not in this way get from color sensations to those of taste or smell. But, as I have shown elsewhere, this is because there are gaps in our human sensory experience, not because there are gaps in the possibilities of sense experience as such. Again, to see how all memories are alike, we should not try to cease imagining particular memories; rather we should imagine how our human memories could continuously expand or contract in various directions, or could have been greater or less in various continuous respects. “Being” is the total system of all cosmic dimensions of continuous variation. It is not the abstraction from these dimensions, nor even in every sense from all particular values among them. To be aware of the dimension of brightness from black to white we need some values, a fairly “pure” black, a good white, a few grays, but it does not matter just which grays, and certainly we cannot possibly have all the infinitude of possible grays before us as definite items. Thus to be aware of a variable involves neither complete omniscience of its concrete values nor absolute abstraction from the concrete. As for contrast, there can be plenty of it — contrast between the dimensions, between cosmic and local variables, between variables and sample values, between all these and “being” as their mode of integration.
I come, at last, to our query: What variables are cosmic in range, applicable to the whole scale of beings?
The most obvious feature of the scale is increasing complexity of spatio-temporal structure. But over at least a part of the scale there is also an increase in psychological complexity— complexity of feeling, volition, and thought. For human beings, at least, differ among themselves in these respects, as well as from animals. Moreover, the “physical” complexity is, in this animal portion of the scale, regarded as the sign of the “psychical “complexity. The question is natural: Can the psychical variables be conceived as extending to the simpler or subanimal segments, and to the superhuman segments, if there are any such? Can psychology be so generalized as to apply to all individuals, or must we generalize beyond psychology?
There are two steps in reaching the answer. First, it is demonstrable that psychological concepts are capable of the required generality. Second, it is demonstrable that to fail to give them this generality merely means that we leave certain aspects of certain portions of the scale of beings impenetrable mysteries.
The psychological concepts are in essence variables with an infinite range of values. Thus the psychological category of cognition has a number of dimensions which admit, in principle, of variations infinitely greater than the variations among known animals. One such dimension is memory span. Man remembers vividly even after one hundred years. No animal is known to remember much longer. Indeed, the effective memory of even the longest-lived animals is doubtless vastly more restricted in time span. But the idea of remembering after 100100 years makes as much sense as the idea of remembering after one hundred seconds. There is in the idea of memory not a suggestion of any finite time as the upper limit beyond which memory would have to be regarded as something else. Nor is there any lower limit. All animals who remember at all must remember not vastly less than a second; for greatly shorter intervals are insignificant in terms of the tempo of zoological response.
But the idea of memory of a millionth of a second, and of correspondingly rapid response, makes sense none the less. There may be creatures with “specious presents” of one millionth of a second, and others for whom time intervals of less than a century are inappreciable. Again, the complexity of what is held together in attention or memory can, so far as the idea of knowing is concerned, vary much more widely than the nervous systems of vertebrates. Human perception can include in its sensory aspect thousands of different patches of color simultaneously; but the conception of an awareness limited by the nature of its possessor to a very few distinguishable portions of space at a time introduces no contradiction. Nor does one involving millions of such portions. Yet no animal is known that is likely to enjoy the latter. Moreover, the awareness of what is really in the spaces perceived can vary enormously in distinctness. In each least distinguishable part of the visual field the real object in nature involves millions of parts. Why do we not perceive these parts as such? There is no answer from the mere notion of perceiving. Nor is there anything in the mere idea of reasoning as a certain use of signs to explain why human mathematicians find the three-body problem too complicated for direct solution.
The category of feeling also involves dimensions which have infinite range. For instance, consider intensity — how great might the intensity of joy or suffering be? There is no finite answer. The related category of sensation is similarly infinite. The dimension of brightness in color sensations has no maximal limit which is set by the idea of sensation. Again, the dimension of saturation, say the series of more and more red colors, comes to no theoretical limit. There is no color so red that a redder must be impossible. To speak of “pure” red is to employ a language of mixture which is manifestly metaphorical and irrelevant in this connection. There is no sensation of sweetness than which a sweeter would be logically impossible. Or take vagueness —how vague may feeling or sensation be? Surely as vague or distinct as you like between the absolute absence of distinctness and the perfect distinctness which is beyond human experience. These dimensions of infinite variation cannot be exhausted by the sensations or feelings of the animals, for the range of terrestrial animality is clearly finite.
Of course one may object that there are physiological or physical limits to the variability of sensation or feeling. This objection will be met more fully later (chap. 12). Here I remark only that nothing in the ideas of these variables as derived from direct experience justifies the objection, which is based on a questionable theory of the mind-body relation. There is nothing in our direct experience of the qualitative difference between gray and red to give any meaning to the idea of a red separated from gray by a finite interval of just noticeable differences, yet so red that a redder red is a contradiction in terms. Or again, there is no necessity in the number (a few score) of noticeably different shades between the gray and the red which we actually experience. Any particular number of divisions of a continuum must be arbitrary so far as the continuum is concerned. The color pyramid is a continuum and as such makes manifest the infinite variability of feeling. But its boundaries are as arbitrary as its divisions.
It is to be observed that physiology can as yet furnish no reason for denying feeling even to so complex an object as the world-whole, for we understand too little how feeling is possible to an animal organism to be able to infer that it is impossible that a different type of whole, even one so vast as the world, should feel. Of course world-feelings would be very different from ours, and probably at least as much more complex as is the world than the human body.
But the intuition of a small number of color tones which constitutes ordinary human vision might, so far as the idea of qualitative intuition is concerned, be complicated beyond any particular number of qualities. In the idea of qualities, or of feeling them together, no reason for a maximal number can be found, though for human feeling a rough limit of the kind could assuredly be derived from a sufficiently advanced physiology. Thus nothing can be denied feeling on the ground of its complexity.
It is also to be observed that no proof for the non-psychic character of individuals is to be derived from their simplicity. For, taking the simplest known entity, the electron, we see that the environment to which it reacts and the reactions themselves are not so simple that there is any absurdity in thinking that these reactions are sentient, or that the electron has a brief after-feeling, a germinal memory, of them. The argument that feeling, memory, and the like could exist only in a nervous system is, I believe — for reasons to be discussed later — wholly fallacious. Here I will merely suggest that the argument is on a par with that which holds that it could not be true that paramecia swim, since they have neither motor nerves nor muscle cells. One could so define swimming that the contention would be just, but a broader definition is not excluded. The same is true of feeling and of the nervous system.
That volition has an unlimited range of conceivable values is obvious enough from its connections with knowledge and feeling. Thus the main variables of psychology are of unlimited breadth or flexibility. Hence it is bluff and not argument to reject the psychic interpretation of the scale of beings on the ground that this interpretation is “anthropomorphic,” for it is precisely in its psychic makeup that a being can be infinitely other than man. The values of psychic variables which are used by panpsychism to interpret the subanimal and the superhuman are values for which otherwise there would be no embodiment and not at all the values realized in man. Those who say psychic concepts are too narrow to apply to all the universe are not thinking of these concepts in their full range. They betray themselves by their reiterated charge that to psychologize everything is to humanize everything — as if an animal caught in a trap must become a man to suffer. It is easy to show that we must generalize beyond psychology — if an arbitrarily restricted psychology is in question. But the only sound approach is first to generalize our psychology.
Of course there are very serious problems in a generalized comparative psychology. Just how much does the “suffering” of a trapped animal resemble that of a man caught in a bear trap? The difficulties of answering this question scientifically are immense. But the truth is not less true because it is less easily accessible to man. Psychological understanding, which according to panpsychism is the only complete understanding, is vicarious experience, and there are of course limits to man’s capacity for that. But it is obvious that it is to his interest to utilize such capacity to the uttermost, since by just so much he increases the richness of his own experience and his knowledge of the ways in which it can be varied and extended. And to deny that we have any evidence by which to determine how animals or even electrons feel is to assert that the relation between “physical” (space-time) pattern and psychical nature is subject to no law, and if we are skeptical to that extent we should face the fact that any faith in natural law — or in the possibility of scientific induction — is for most philosophies except panpsychism only a necessary postulate. Even if we define the psychic behavioristically it will still be true that the idea of behavior is subject to continuous variables of infinite range. Thus even the contention of positivists that the physical language is the only scientific one does not dispose of the argument for panpsychism.
The second ground for using the psychological variables over the whole scale of beings is that there are no other variables. The variables of physics are not a different set but the same set with certain aspects altered, not into other positive aspects, but into — question marks (see chap. 11). For the space-time structures dealt with by physics, being the dynamic patterns of the world, do not of themselves answer the question, Patterns of what? A world of interacting minds must have a dynamic space-time structure. To say that a part of the world does not contain interacting minds because it is physical is to say that it contains no minds related in a pattern because it is patterned. It is also to say that our “knowledge” that the patterns will endure is a pure act of faith. For only the psychic or at least a quasi-psychic interpretation of nature throws any light upon the reality of patterns or laws (Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Peirce, Whitehead). This point will be discussed in the six following chapters.
The “psychic” variables, in short, are simply all the variables with unlimited range, the concepts with supreme flexibility or breadth. To call them psychic is justified, not because the associations of the word are pleasant or exciting, but because it may help us to remember the following truths. All variables, whatever else they may be, must be variables of human experience, must have more than one value satisfied by that experience. We cannot conceive any mode of difference from our experiences which is not in some degree also a mode of difference between these experiences. We can generalize beyond human experience only by generalizing “experience “ itself beyond the human variety. For there can be no experiential meaning to a distinction between what is experienced and what is simply not experienced, but only to the distinction between what is experienced by a given individual or species of individual and what is not so experienced; and this distinction has a meaning because the ways in which one experience of an individual differs from another experience of that individual involve an infinite range of values in principle, but a finite range in fact. If it be asked how the individual can be aware of this infinite range if his experience is finite, the answer is that it is only the distinct or fully conscious aspect of human experience which is finite; while the faint, slightly conscious background embraces all past time (else this phrase has no meaning), all the future, all space, and all possibility. And thanks to this dim consciousness of infinity, we can conceive in principle an indefinite extension of the distinct consciousness which in us is finite. For the theist, the infinite we dimly feel is God, in whom are distinct all the values that are distinct anywhere, and whose experience is the measure of the infinite variables as such, as well as the integration of all the finite values which happen to be anywhere actualized. The infinite possibilities of experience are derived from the infinite power of God, in whom are realized the supreme values of the cosmic variables.
The notion that God must be even higher than the maximal case of known variables is simply a set of words without meaning. For “higher” is defined by these variables, or it is merely a veil for intellectual sabotage.
But there appear to be two rival claimants for maximal predicates, God and the Universe. Modern philosophy since Spinoza has wrestled with this apparent duality of supreme beings. Only in our generation has an at least plausible solution been found. This solution will be presented in The Vision of God. The key to it is the recognition that superiority in the scale of beings implies inclusiveness, not exclusiveness, of individuals of lower levels, the latter not sacrificing all of their independence in being so included (e.g., electrons in a cell, cells in a vertebrate). The higher include lower individuals as such — i.e., without reducing them to the role of mere “matter” for the higher “form,” as Aristotle would have thought, though modern philosophy, even without the testimony of modern science (atomic theory, cell theory), shows that his conception is an error in principle. Modern thought has even tended to the opposite mistake, that of treating atoms (it is now electrons) as the sole form-giving or determining factor, while the higher individuality, say the human mind, becomes the helpless material molded by the omnipotent atom. These opposite extremes are both superseded in the balanced view which grants relative truth to both. This balanced view is also good common sense; for if it seems evident to the plain man that his mind and its purposes can act upon parts of his body, causing them to move, it seems no less evident to him that parts of his body can act upon his mind, causing it to undergo various sensations. Only the theory of the “compound individual,” the individual consisting of individuals which to some extent, but not absolutely, are subordinated to the whole, can satisfactorily interpret the facts of modern science or satisfactorily solve the old philosophical problems of the one and the many, or of the mind and the body, or of the universe (or God) and its constituents.3 The psychic or infinite variables and the compound individual —which is only the infinite psychic variable referred to by St. Paul when he said, “We are members one of another” — are the keys to the scale of beings.
Notes
1. From The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals, edited by Odell Shepard (Used by permission of, and by arrangement with, Houghton Muffin Co.), pp. 125, 87.
2. On the infinite variables see:
The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Harvard University Press, 1931-35), Vols. I and VI. Book I B, especially VI. 169 (paragraph 169 of Vol. VI) -73, VI. 190-200, VI. 203-6.
Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (University of Chicago Press, 1934), secs. 2, 5, 6, 26-36, 39-40.
W. P. Montague, “Confessions of an Animistic Materialist,” in Contemporary American Philosophy, edited by G. P. Adams and W. P. Montague (The Macmillan Co., 1930), Vol. II.
3. On the compound individual see:
A. N. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (The Macmillan Co., 1933), Chap. VIII, sec. 7, pp. 197, 216; Chap. XI, secs. 5, 20; Chap. VIII.
Charles Hartshorne, The Compound Individual,” in Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead (Longmans, Green & Co., 1936).
William Stern, in The History of Psychology in Autobiography, edited by C. A. Murchison (Clark University Press, 1930). Also, Stern, “The Metaphysical Foundations of Critical Personalism,” Personalist, 1936.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Beyond Humanism: Essays in the Philosophy of Nature. pp. 111-124.