Charles Hartshorne, who is recognized as a leading figure in process philosophy, was at the University of Louvain [in Belgium] in the autumn of 1978 as a guest professor. He has written several books and articles setting out and developing a concept of God which has been quite influential in recent theology. In the following interview which took place on the 6th of November, 1978, during his stay at Louvain, Hartshorne talks about his religious philosophy and his work in general.
Part I On His Religious Philosophy
Q: Anyone who is familiar with your writing cannot help but see how much of your time and interest are taken up with trying to clarify what is meant by the term ‘God’. Would it be correct to say that what you want to do is to provide a philosophical framework so that one could understand in a consistent, adequate and faithful manner what religion means by ‘God’ ?
H: I would certainly say so.
Q: What you are in fact proposing is not an alternative idea of God but a different way of understanding God.
H: Yes, that’s true. You know, Pascal started the comparison between the God of religion and the God of philosophy. But I think that what he meant by the God of philosophy was the God of philosophy at that time. For many centuries before that it was not necessarily the God of philosophy as we understand it nowadays. They are not necessarily so different, the God of philosophy and the God of religion.
Q: As regards your method, you also write that there is a symbolic, an analogical and a literal way of speaking about God. You claim further that we can positively and literally apply metaphysical categories, such as contingency, necessity, finitude, infinity, to God. Are these to be understood as applying to God in an eminent, i.e. unsurpassable, way?
H: Yes. There is a difference in principle, but I hold that the categories themselves enable us to state what this difference is. It does not mean that we can understand the divine side of the contrast in anything like the way God understands it, but we have an indication of what the difference is and also why we cannot fully understand it.
Q: But you do maintain that in so far as it literally and positively applies to God, we can have some understanding of God.
H: Yes. I’d like to say one more thing there. What we are understanding is not exactly God, but we are understanding how our idea of God is going to be. In other words, we understand how we are using the word ‘God’ as different from all sorts of other words. So we are really understanding our own human concepts. People talk of defining God. We cannot possibly define God. You cannot even define a human individual. But we can define our idea of God, that which distinguishes God for us conceptually from all others.
Q: But how does one go from the idea to the reality?
H: Well, it is a matter of concrete experience. Any concrete reality, for example a person, is more than any definition. We cannot define a friend. He is always more than any definition for a definition is always very abstract.
Q: Do you mean that there is some correspondence between our idea and the reality?
H: Yes, if we are careful and lucky, then we are not telling any lies about God. We say that certain things distinguish him from anything else. But there is an infinity of other things which cannot be put into the definition because they are too specific and concrete and because we do not know enough.
Q: If there is this difference in principle between God and non-divine creatures, are we not in fact destroying the predication in the same way that we seem to be doing in analogical talk ? When we try to spell out the differences between God and us, we discover that the supposed analogy does not hold at all.
H: Well, if they do the thing in the wrong way. I think that is what happened for centuries. They made literal statements about God. The fact that they were very negative mostly did not mean that they were not full statements. They literally forbade God to be certain things. And I think some of that forbidding God to be this or that was very rash. It was supposed to be very modest. A positive term there does not apply. Maybe it does apply. Maybe it is not modest to say that it does not apply. That is the question. Maybe it is rash to tell God, he must not change, for example. Maybe he needs to change and wants to change.
Q: In your various writings you refer to the religious idea of God as the Worshipful One and you describe how religion regards God’s reality, God’s power, love, happiness and his knowability. How do you understand the religious claim regarding God’s knowledge?
H: Religion assumes that God knows the truth in the sense in which we don’t. We know something like the truth but God knows the truth. And I would say that that is literally correct. I accept that. That is the religious view of God. If a person says that God knows that I am innocent, it is a very direct way of saying that I am innocent. What God knows and the truth are the same. I accept that definition of God. It is the one knowledge which coincides with the truth.
Q: So what you want to do then in your philosophy is to elaborate on these very basic insights which religion has regarding God’s knowledge.
H. Yes, I believe that that is the problem. Religion says that philosophy chiefly invents the problem, though I argue that philosophy could get into the problem itself. Historically, it seems to have come from religion. This is a complicated thing. Plato was a very sophisticated theist without in any way fitting the definition of religion at that time.
Q: I’d like to come now to your own idea of God, that is, God as conceived in your philosophy. You describe him as dipolar. He has a concrete and an abstract pole. My first question is really about the terms ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’.
H: The concrete is the fullness of reality. The abstract is something you get to by not paying attention to some aspects of the fullness of reality. You omit things, what you get is the abstract aspect.
Q: So the abstract is really a partial feature of concrete reality.
H: Yes, the concrete reality is the whole story. It includes its own contrast in the abstract because abstracting is done in the concrete experience. Mathematicians themselves are concrete, whereas their mathematical experience has its abstractions.
Q: To some the word abstract refers to a mental entity. How does your usage of that word differ from that understanding?
H: Well, I think wherever there is any sense of the abstract in nature there is something like thought that can be very primitive, but I think that Whitehead and Peirce were very profound in seeing that the basic way in which the contrast between abstract and concrete is found in experience, the most basic and most concrete way in which that contrast occurs, is in our sense of the future. What we have of the future, as long as it is future, is not a set of particulars. It is a set of more or less definite and specific, but not completely definite or specific, possibilities or necessities: what can happen, what must happen, what might happen. That is the future. So when tomorrow becomes today, then it becomes a set of concrete definite particulars. Before tomorrow is today there can be no wholly definite particulars in tomorrow. Any animal that is aware of the future at all has the germ of thought. It may be only an undeveloped germ.
Q: In the view of some philosophers there is a distinction between a logical entity and real entity, meaning by the second phrase, something outside thought.
H: Well, you have to be careful. There are relations of reason as the Scholastics call them. They are quite right about this. If I think of Thomas Aquinas then you could say that Thomas Aquinas has a relation to me of being-thought-about-by-me, but that is only in my mind. There is nothing in Thomas Aquinas like that. My thinking about him is nothing to him (unless he is up in heaven knowing about it).
Q: That means, he remains external to this particular relation.
H: Yes, nothing I can think about Thomas Aquinas adds anything to that past reality, as he was in his earthly lifetime. It is something to me so that the relation is real in me and only logical in Thomas Aquinas. Many logicians missed the point. They said for every relation there is a converse relation. But the converse relation may not be real in the same sense at all.
Q: You maintain that the concrete contains the abstract since the abstract is only a partial feature of the whole reality?
H: Yes, in the same way that the present contains an aspect of futurity as basis of the future and it cannot be understood apart from that.
Q: You are presumably talking here of the application of these two terms to actual reality.
H: Yes.
Q: But if the term ‘concrete’ is itself abstract, could one not say then that the abstract term ‘concrete’ contains reality in its fullness?
H: No, because the universal never contains its instances. If it did, we would never know what the universal was until we knew all the instances. The absolute idealists refused to admit this. They were obsessed with the Hegelian phrase ‘concrete universal’. They wanted the universal to be the concrete fullness of reality. Someone actually said—he was a very honest man, he came right out with the most ridiculous things—he said to know what you mean by the word ‘horse’ is to know that there are horses and how many there are. That’s as far as you can go in the absurd direction. It is not the case. The whole point of the universal like ‘horse’ is that you can know what it is without knowing all the horses.
Q: My next question concerns God’s knowledge of reality. You maintain in your writings that God knows the past as past, as something settled and determinate. He knows the future as something partially indeterminate, however, in an omniscient and in an infallible way.
H: Right.
Q: How about God’s knowledge of the present?
H: It is very difficult to analyze knowledge of the present. It is not really clear in what sense you need knowledge of the present. Does the present have to know itself? The present is itself. I suspect that the whole point of knowledge is to give the present access to the past and future. It does not have to have access to itself. It is itself. Alexander said it, it enjoys itself. Maybe that is the best way to put it.
Q: There has been a shift in your thinking regarding this aspect of your philosophy. Would that be right?
H: Oh, I once thought that the whole simultaneous present state of the world was influencing my experience here and now. About twenty years ago I decided Whitehead was right. That won’t do. You cannot have simultaneous symmetrical interaction between contemporaries.
Q; So what we really know is the past.
H; Yes, I am strongly inclined to say that. Of course, we know a lot about the present because the present state of the world has to express the causal stability of the world. Our past overlaps with the past of our neighbors and in terms of our common past we predict what they are doing now. And if they are close to us in space and time, that prediction is fairly reliable. If our neighbor is walking along and he is taking one step, we know he’ll take another step.
Q; We know something of the future because the future contains something of the past.
H: In principle we know the present and the future in the same way. This is the idea of Whitehead, and I think he is right. It is relativity, Einstein’s picture.
Q: You also maintain that God as creator needs some kind of creation but not a particular creation or a particular world.
H: Quite right.
Q: Does this mean that creation as creation or creation as such has a necessary existence?
H: Yes, it means that God is in essence creating. You see, if he could refrain from any creating at all, then he would only be potentially a creator. He would not actually be a creator at all. Now, I would maintain that potentiality is only a way of looking at creativity. So you cannot talk about potentiality of being creative. Unless there is creativity already, there is no potentiality and really there is nothing to talk about. Bergson said long ago that duration—and he meant duration as creative—is reality itself. I think that is one more memorable saying in the history of philosophy. I don’t think it was said before. I think Heraclitus was about 27 centuries ahead of his time. The Greeks could not know what to think of it.
Q: But if this is the case, how does the necessity of creation as such differ from God’s necessity?
H: Does it differ? The only world God has to have is the world he has by his very essence. And that’s a completely abstract thing: some world or the world-as-such. There is no particular world; it would not have any of the laws of nature of our present world. It would all be different. And in the remote past and the remote future all the laws may have been or may be different. Whitehead thinks so, and I agree with that.
Q: You have described your view on immortality as an unconventional one, in that immortality in your philosophy means ‘being remembered by God’. Could one not say, however, that what you are presenting is a metaphysical interpretation? By this I mean that this is what immortality in the abstract (following your definition of abstract) is. However, what concrete form it takes cannot be known by metaphysics but is open to various religious theories.
H: Well, I have often thought that the expressions our ancestors used to use—they’ve talked about being out of time and in eternity or something and an external mode of existence; sometimes they said that it was a qualitative and not just a quantitative thing and so on—that they were hitting at the same thing. A lot of things that were said about being in heaven would still apply because it is true that you are still not exposed to dangers and so on. All your issues are settled for good. You are no longer exposed to additional ever-new slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, so to speak. It is all finished for you. But the traditional view wanted to slip in there the idea that you are having further experiences which you never had before at all, which are still your experiences, not just God’s experiences of you, but your experiences of yourself. But my kind of philosophy does not make it clear that that is either necessary or even desirable. It looks desirable off-hand. Lots of people feel they want it.
Q: Would you say that this is a good example of metaphysics correcting religious views?
H: It might be, but don’t forget that, the ancient Jews did not have the conventional view of immortality. For them we worship God on earth. We don’t wait to get to heaven to start enjoying God. We have to do it now, or not at all. So religion had it before philosophy. And to me that is part of the glory of the ancient Jews that they could conceive worshipping God without any further reward for that than you get on earth. The worshipping of God is taken as its own reward to a certain extent.
Q: So you would maintain that the whole doctrine of post-mortem rewards and punishments and even personal immortality are further developments of religious beliefs.
H: Well, I think that the Book of Job is a very astounding thing. Job is somehow convinced in his encounter with the divine, the voice of the whirlwind, that he could worship God without having some little theory as to why there is evil in life or why he had suffered, that the majesty of God was worshipful just in itself. He did not need to know those things, and he did not need to be promised any reward. And at the end of the book then Job is made happy and prosperous again. But that is not what convinced him that he could worship God. He was not promised this. He accepted God without that. To me that is a sublime love. You find these things somewhere in the Bible. That and the book of Genesis are the good things in the Bible, in the Old Testament.
Q: I’d now like to come to your work on the so-called proofs for the existence of God. It strikes one who reads your work that what emerges from your arguments is an ultimate principle of rationality, i.e. without this principle value, order and others would not have an ultimate meaning.
H: Yes.
Q: My question is: how does this lead to saying that this principle is God? In other words, are you not introducing here a religious interpretation which does not seem to be required by the abstract ultimacy?
H: Well, I would say that any abstract explanation of the world is going to be completely abstract without some analogy to our concrete experience of life and I am prepared to argue systematically that in the last analysis we don’t understand anything concrete except by analogy with ourselves as concrete. We are for ourselves the example, the paradigm of concrete reality, and if the cosmic principle has no analogy to ourselves as concrete, then it is just an empty abstraction. You could say, well, it is a great force. That’s a wholly indefinite thing. What does that mean, a great force? Or energy is the universal reality. Well, what is that? Suppose that it is an abstract notion of something happening. It is really nothing but becoming itself. I think religion has the concreteness of this.
Q: But would you say that it is contradictory for somebody to agree with you as regards this ultimate principle of rationality but would refuse to call it God?
H: Oh, of course, he can refuse the word. Whitehead sometimes said that he wished he had not used the word God in Process and Reality. In Modes of Thought he does not use the word ‘God’ at all. He talks about deity. I think that he had a theory that historical connotations were troublesome. He was either taken to be more traditional than he meant to be or people were upset because they were used to the traditional word and he did not have the traditional idea of it. So he decided to try to avoid that by using other words like deity. In the end of Adventures of Ideas there again God does not come in much. But you have the word ‘Eros’, the Greek word for love, and that means God.
Q: But would it not be true to say that these proofs need a faith-context? They would lead us to affirm God’s existence only within the context of faith.
H: Well, I think if we never heard of any religious tradition we could have the problem put to us: don’t we have to understand things by analogy with our own experience? And if our own experience is concrete only in as far as it is experience of ourselves, so do we not have to conceive things by analogy with ourselves? And now if you want to conceive something which is cosmically relevant and cosmically influential and which is relevant to all times, for all space, so that it is relevant to the question, what meaning does life have since we all die and so on because this thing we are talking about survives any death? It is imperishable and so on. And if philosophy could generate this problem, it seems to me, how are we going to conceive something cosmic which will illuminate all these basic problems of life unless we conceive them by analogy with ourselves? That does not mean that God is going to be something like a super-person so that you could end up by a perfectly rational reflection, it seems to me, at the religious problem. And then of course you might think it sensible to see what religious people do intuitively before much philosophical argumentation.
Q: You used the word ‘intuition’ to describe faith. What exactly do you mean?
H: Well, intuition has various meanings. Immanuel Kant used it. The German word is ‘Angchauung’ which is a little different from intuition. But ‘schauen’ is to look. It is a direct gaze at reality, a direct experience of reality. But the term is also used more broadly when people solve mathematical problems. They intuitively guess the answer to a mathematical question. That is a little more. It is not really a direct experience of the thing. It is more indirect. Still, it is very close. Now I hold that we have a direct intuition, a direct experience of God at all times. But this direct intuition of God is not very accessible to consciousness. I don’t think most philosophers thought enough of the idea that experience is only more or less conscious. A baby has experience. It has feelings, for instance. It has simple memories but it is not very conscious if by being conscious would mean that the baby says to itself, ‘Well, there I am feeling the pain. Is it not too bad and so on.’ It is not conscious that way. It just feels the pain and starts screaming. You see, I argue that it is impossible if we should experience anything without in some sense experiencing God because the standard religious idea of God is that he is ubiquitous. He is everywhere; he is immanent in everything. So if we experience anything, we experience God. We may not be able to detect that. God is the universal cause and the cause is in its effect in my philosophy. You can see the cause in the effect or not, in any case the cause is there in the effect. So when the mystic says that he experiences God, I cannot say that it is impossible because we all experience God. The only thing special about the mystic is he says he is conscious of this. My teacher, Rufus Jones, who is reputed to be a mystic, one of the few Americans I have ever heard of in the world-view to be a mystic, is one. He always said that the difference between the mystic and anybody else is a relative difference. It is a difference in degree. It is not an absolute difference. I accept that. I would say that this means that we can all experience God. The mystic is the one who can be conscious of this. I don’t see any way of proving it can’t be, but it seems that most of us can’t be conscious in any very distinct way. Vaguely we may feel we are conscious of God. But I think we are, vaguely.
Q: Finally, since what you have done is to provide a philosophical framework for this religious term ‘God’ so that we could understand it quite adequately, how in your opinion do people in religion accept your interpretation or your philosophy?
H: Well, they accept it more or less the way it is, I think. But of course, they emphasize this or add something to it in this way or that. Or maybe they reject something. But I think a lot of them come very close to seeing it the way it is. I was astonished to find a perfectly correct and readable and clear account of my philosophy written by a dissertation by a Seventh-day Adventist. I had no idea that such a person would ever bother with my writings at all. He teaches in one of their colleges. I did not know that they have colleges but they have two.
Part II: On His Work
Q: The amount of writing which you have done is quite tremendous. Could you give us some background to your work as a writer?
H: I started to write when I was in boarding-school. First thing I wrote was a little account of a bird-walk as I had started to be a bird-watcher. It’s been lost. I don’t have it now. But I remember vaguely that I thought it was quite interesting. People in school seemed deeply interested. Then I wrote a short story. I still dream that way: as I come out of the dream, it takes the form of a short story. So I should have been a short-story writer. But I missed that. So I started to write and then I began to write poetry very soon after that. I wrote quite a bit of poetry and published some in the school paper and published some in the Haverfordian, a literary journal at Haverford. When I got to Harvard, I competed for a prize in sonnet writing. I did not get the prize, but the Harvard literary journal published the poem. Then there was a student paper interested in philosophical topics, graduate student papers. I wrote for that. So I was a writer ten years before I taught a class at all. So I consider I’ve been a writer nearly all my life. I’ve thought of myself as a writer first of all. If I had had a lot of money and a guaranteed income without a job, I might have just been a writer. So I became a teacher, mainly because I decided that just trying to live by writing was a gamble I did not want to make. I had a very practical premise: security.
Q: Is this what you meant when you wrote in one of your works that for you it was a matter of ‘teach or perish’?
H: Yes, there is a saying ‘publish or perish’. I say that my problem has not been ‘publish or perish’ but ‘teach or perish’. I had to teach, I did not have to write. I wanted to write. I would have written no matter what.
Q: Do you write your ideas in long-hand or do you type them out?
H: I started typing during editing Peirce’s papers at Harvard while doing a little bit of teaching. That was in 1926 and I was twenty-nine years old. Before that I had always written in long-hand. Then I started to type. I had some typing lessons in 1919. But I did not acquire a typewriter until 1925 or ’26. Then I started to type and I have done it ever since. I had lessons in typing, a few of them at the University of California, which became a summer course. I was out there in 1919 before I went to Harvard. A friend of mine and I enrolled in this class. There was a big woman in authority, who went around. So when we were doing something wrong . . . . That’s how I learned to touch-type. I’ve never done it extraordinarily well. It always annoys me that I make so many mistakes. But I go with moderate speed now; it’s faster than writing. I’ve sometimes gone back to writing in long-hand. But I’ve really no firm conviction as to which way I can do it better. I can do it either way quite well. It is easier on your eyes when you do it on the typewriter. Reading your own handwriting, at least mine, is not always easy on the eyes, especially if you have corrected and crossed out a lot of things. I tend to make a mess.
Q: You seem to have two distinctive styles of writing, one extremely readable, the other difficult to read.
H: Well, I’m probably trying to meet some very technical sophisticated criticisms in some cases. There is a fellow who likes to attack me: Peter Hare. He and Madden write together. He complained recently about Whitehead’s and my “infuriating obscurity”. I’m going to try to get from him just the examples of this he has in mind. I would admit that some of my early writings, I think, were more obscure than they ought to be. I wonder how many of these come from recent writings. I suspect some of these examples would go back to my early writings.
Q: You write then with definite readers in mind?
H: I gave speeches at colleges where the audiences were not supposed to be trained in philosophy—a general audience. I’ve also talked to church groups. Of course, a number of those have not been published. They vary. I’m certainly writing for definite readers at definite times. Half of my writings and probably more were talks I was asked to give or essays to write. And that is one main reason why I’ve written so much. I sometimes think I’ve written far too much. I should have written less and made it more lucid and more telling, more eloquent. But I’ve had so many requests. If you write a fair amount then you get asked to write a lot more. People who are expected to work hard are the people who have already worked hard. So the only security against working very hard is never to get started. Then they don’t expect it of you.
Q: Your other interest is ornithology. You have also written on this subject, haven’t you?
H: Yes, one book and some articles. The articles came first. The articles at first appeared in mostly professional ornithological journals. Then I kept trying to place further articles, they got longer and more complicated because I got more ideas which I wanted to put together. I began to get refusals, to get turned down, partly because the articles were too long, partly because I was trying to explain a whole concrete way of looking at things, and that really requires a book, rather than articles. So finally I got a refusal which made me realise this was beating my head against a dead wall. This can’t be done in articles. This had to be in book-form. Here I have been talking about writing a book all these years. I better start doing it. So in the preface to that book I thanked journal editors for turning me down because they forced me to do what I should have done anyway.
Q: You also seemed to have traveled much. You mentioned in conversation that you have been practically in every continent in the world.
H: Not Russia, not any part of Russia. And not China, except what you can see from Hongkong. I’ve been in Taiwan, which they consider part of China.
Q: Were you ever in Africa?
H: Oh yes, but only in Kenya and Uganda.
Q: Did you travel in your capacity as a professional philosopher or as an ornithologist?
H: The African visit was purely for birds. At least one of my South American visits was just for birds, I guess. They had Pan-American philosophical meetings and about two world meetings in South America. So I nearly always had a philosophical excuse for going to look at and to listen to birds. I was in the Philippines, but that was only for birds, except that I had two former students there. They gave me a dinner, and they would have had me give a speech but the university was not in residence. So I had a nice talk with my former students.
Q: Did you get to see much of the country while you were there?
H: I got up on the lower slopes of Mt. Makiling, not far from Manila. There is a biological station there. In a number of parts of the world the way to get to the birds is to find the biological station or forestry station. It is not designed for bird-watching, but the birds are usually there too, you see.
Q: The greatest impact of your work has been on theology. Can you see your ideas being taken up in other fields, for instance, in politics or in science?
H: Well, certainly not nearly as much. It is certainly true that the majority of my readers have strong theological interests. I haven’t entirely wanted it to be that way. I have written a lot of things which are not expressly theological, but are philosophical. In my first book on sensation there is no mention of God at all, almost nothing about religion. I keep trying to remedy that. My book Creative Synthesis was one effort to remedy that. I think that it hasn’t got all the attention it should have, and I still think it will probably get more attention. It was promoted in a very effective way. People think they know about me by now. Many people do write me off as a theologian, I think. In fact, Karl Popper was quoted as saying of me, “He is a theologian but he argues”, which I take as a high compliment from Popper.
Q: Finally, would you like to share with us some of your personal views as you look back on a very distinguished career and as you look forward to your future?
H: I sometimes wish I had written less but better. I have written pretty well, but one can always do better. I think it is important to make everything published count. Whitehead said once—he gave me the best advice; I did not completely follow it, in the early part of my career especially—he said, “You shouldn’t write so that people would say, ‘There is Hartshorne being obscure’. You should write so that people will say ‘There is Hartshorne, making his point”: I should have taken that more seriously than I did. That was the best possible advice, I think.
I don’t particularly regret any main feature of my career. I spent a long time at the University of Chicago. And that was a great university to be connected with. I met a lot of scientists which I might not have done somewhere else. I happened to get into a scientific milieu right from the beginning. But the department there was not very congenial to my main area of philosophy and became less so. That’s why I finally left it. I went to Emory because I had friends there, including the vice-president. He is a good friend, and they made it appealing to me. I stayed there seven years. Then I came to the University of Texas where I also have friends. Texas treated me very well.
I have a little bit of regret, I guess, that Harvard did not give me an invitation. But I was considered. There was a split in the department. And the majority, I guess, voted against me. I understand why. I had bad luck starting to teach there, partly because I needed to learn to teach. I am a born writer, but not a born teacher. And that was part of the trouble, it was one of the things people say was bad luck. I did not apparently distinguish myself as a teacher there. Harvard is very insistent on teaching. They won’t take you just because you are a good writer. And also my first writings, probably, by their standards, were not too good. I should have been more cautious. But I don’t know whether I regret very much not being at Harvard. I think I gained quite a bit by being at Chicago. I was a colleague of Rudolf Carnap. That was a good discipline for me, a very different kind of philosophy. The rest were disciples of George Herbert Mead, John Dewey, naturalistic pragmatists. That probably was good for me. So I don’t have any great regret about not being at Harvard.
Q: And your stay at the University of Texas at Austin?
H: Ah well, it has been a fine department, it has been a very friendly department. There are thirty people and I don’t have any unpleasant feelings about any of them. I think it is very congenial, partly because of the large support, partly because John Silver more or less made the Department. When I first went there he was building it up at a great rate. He had the flair for detecting what he calls SOVs.1 “The man is a great genius. So maybe we’ll take him. Otherwise, we won’t take any SOVs”.
Q: And the future? Will you be writing more books or giving courses?
H: I have three or four books more or less written; it is just a question of perfecting them and of my wife having time to edit them. She has saved me from a lot of grammatical blunders. She did professional editing for years. My ambition which may amuse some people—is, if possible, to be the best philosopher over eighty. I can try it. I do not have very much competition. Some people relax when they hear you saying you are over seventy. I haven’t started to relax very much yet. Plato died when he was eighty. Aristotle died in his seventies. So I really have very little competition. I think Kant was getting a bit senile about that time. Schopenhauer thought Kant got senile because he had given orders to his servant to wake him up at 5.00 in the morning no matter how sleepy he was and to make him get out of bed. And he refused to take naps. Schopenhauer thought that brought about his premature senility. And Schopenhauer could be right! Because I take a nap since my twenties.
Q; Will you be doing a lot of traveling?
H: I’d rather hope not. I think I have done a lot of traveling. It’s not so good anymore for me to be traveling on account of birds because like almost everybody else who is over sixty or seventy or eighty, the high pitches of birds and sometimes they are very high—I don’t hear anymore. I can hear the middle pitches. They are the best. So I don’t intend to do much bird watching any more, But it is still a wonderful interest I have because it takes you fairly far from philosophy. And there is always some theoretical question which your observations can bear out.
Q: Thank you. It has been a pleasure talking to you.
I should like to thank Milltown Institute of Theology and Philosophy, Dublin, for giving me the opportunity of meeting Charles Hartshorne and Trinity College, Dublin, for providing a travel grant. —S.S.
Note
1. An online search for SOVs suggests that the abbreviation means “someone very special.” —HyC