By Charles Hartshorne
I awoke from a dream thinking how to arrive at my neoclassical theism in a few easy steps. We start from where we are, members of one of who knows how many species of animals on a comparatively tiny planet in a small solar system. Our species is special on this planet (and this is objective fact not mere collective conceit on our part) in combining the following traits otherwise not found in other species (unless in small degree): of tool-making as well as of tool-using, and of language in the full grammatical sense, plus an innate ability to make and to imitate sounds. Chimpanzees are not sound-imitators, but parrots and numerous songbirds are. Howling monkeys and Gibbon apes, in narrowly limited ways, copy sounds, as do Hump-backed whales. Some primates can be taught to understand visual signs, again, in limited ways. With language comes ability to refer to abstract aspects of experience in complicated ways, such as there is no reason to attribute even to gorillas or whales, although one species of the latter does imitate sounds, again, in narrowly limited ways.
Our superiority to other animals, and there is such a thing, is relative, not absolute, but huge quantitative or intensive differences make qualitative differences, as our population problems make obvious and as is shown in many other ways. Still, it is stupid not to see that all the higher mammals and the birds have qualities well above those of fish and still simpler creatures. Hierarchy is not reasonably deniable. Just because some claims to superiority are unjustified is no reason to declare all such claims must be so. For instance, the often alleged superiority of men over women ignores the glaring fact that the special human combination of manipulative, linguistic, and sound-imitative ability is shown in females with no demonstrable innate inferiorities on the female side. That females do the primary work of reproduction and child care is the explanation of their failure to compare with men in many cultural lines, plus the well-attested principle that the-physically greater average height and muscular strength of men and other crude physical advantages tempts them to indulge in self-serving illusions, plus the principle that “power corrupts.”
The higher animals have much of what lower animals have, plus some additional capacities. We, for example, have excellent visual and auditory capacities, sensations of smell, taste, warmth, cold, of pleasure and pain, and kinesthetic sensations. And only the primates and whale-dolphins come near to us in their cortical development, upon which intelligence depends.
What about the plants, are they like animals but inferior? Here many philosophers and much common sense tend to be somewhat confused. A plant is not simply an inferior version of what animals are. An animal acts as one, and may reasonably be thought to feel as one, but a visible plant, say a tree, does not act as one and should not be thought to feel as one. You say a tree grows. I reply, its cells multiply and we call this growth. What animals and plants do have in common is that they are either single cells or composites of cells. A cell acts as one, or so some of us think, but there is no evidence that a tree does this. There is evidence that you or I do act as one and feel as one. Our cells or still smaller constituents do that which we experience as at our bidding. Moreover, we know what makes this possible. Our central nervous systems and brains are what distinguish us from trees and other visibly large plants. It surprises me that this is not taught to every school child.
Recent philosophers whom I take most seriously are well aware of the foregoing. They are also aware of the fact that in plant and animal bodies, in all cells, some basic constituents of so-called inanimate nature are also present, the minerals, many types of atoms and molecules.
So, to a considerable extent, we human animals sum up what nature is made of. But we need to learn to take with a grain of salt, to put it mildly, the term “inanimate.” For the Greeks, beginning with Socrates and with the exception of Epicurus, thought of what we call inanimate as wholly inactive, inert, not doing anything (hence, not feeling anything). Epicurus shrewdly guessed that even atoms are ever-active, each acting as one. Early modern science, like the Stoics and Spinoza, yes, and even Leibniz, regressed back to the earlier atomism that denied the self-activity of atoms. As Plato saw, genuine self-activity means some degree, however slight in many cases, of freedom, contingency in the outcome of situations, given their causal past, including their own past actions. With quantum theory, and even before that, leading scientists began to challenge this strict determinism, this denial of creative, unpredetermined action.
We are now ready to raise the question of theism, of God. God is, of course, conceived as the final hierarchical superior. In what way superior? For one thing, whereas we, and all animals, plants, and so on down to the smallest constituents of nature, are, in some sense, localized entities, here but not there, now but not then, God is thought of in the high religions as non-localized, or (put positively, ubiquitous) cosmic, not regional. Indeed, God was thought of as supercosmic, as well as ubiquitous. Here we must be careful. Does the ubiquity of deity mean that God is disembodied mind, soul but not body? Here Peirce, Bergson, and Whitehead, three of my heroes, all made a mistake, as I see things. They either forgot or (Whitehead) emphatically rejected Plato’s idea that the cosmos is the divine body of which God is the soul or mind. None of the three gives what I can see as a cogent argument against Plato on this point. After all, the minds we know about are all embodied, not only that, we are at a loss if we try to distinguish between what our bodies make possible for our minds and what of our mentality could manage without a body. Here I agree with Merleau-Ponty, the most influential French philosopher after Bergson. He said that all knowledge depends on the “flesh.” It is only through our bodies that we perceive the rest of nature. Which scientists are ready to stand up and be counted as rejecting this assertion? If we take Plato seriously and correct his science, there never was any need to believe in literally inert matter; mind can explain everything in nature. Cells and other self-active singulars (on subhuman and even sub-animal and sub-vegetable levels) are not dispensable, but they can be thought of as very low-level psyches, with feelings but scarcely thoughts. How much thought does even a baby have?
Whether the mind-body relation can yield an acceptable analogy to the God and human person relation depends on how the former relation is conceived. Whitehead’s own doctrine of the psycho-physiological relations and of God actually supports the analogy, and it is astonishing that he failed to see this. His doctrine of prehension, or, in the concrete cases, “feeling of (others’) feeling,” can be called, as he notes, the relation of sympathy, implying feeling on both sides of the subject-object distinction. In physical suffering, not we alone suffer, some of our bodily constituents do. He does not spell this out, but his system requires it if it means anything. This is the first great metaphysics that makes sympathy, which is the kernel of love, central in knowledge. God feels our feeling as we feel the feelings in some of our cells. God’s prehensions, like ours, are feeling of others’ feelings, but the divine prehensions are adequate to their objects and constitute the very truth of the actual cosmos. Hence, God is, indeed, “the fellow sufferer who understands.” We do sympathize but with only very limited understanding, much of our feeling being tainted with hatred, fear, jealousy, or simple apathy (“negative prehensions”).
Mind, as we know it, in a process, involves change, becoming, not mere being. If God feels, then surely divine prehension is passive as well as active, it receives as well as gives, and is not immutable. And if all feeling (Plato, Whitehead) is self-active, to some extent free, then when we enact a change in ourselves, we partly determine what God prehends or feels. Not just God “makes” the world, God and the creatures are creative. And we say that “we make” plans, decisions, or “make up our minds.” That linguistic analysts have not stressed, or even mentioned, this point shows their lack of impartiality in applying their doctrine of the sufficiency of ordinary language. Common sense has also been remiss here or it would not have accepted the medieval doctrine of “pure actuality,” or wholly active mind in God. Also, Merleau-Ponty, had he lived longer after he told Sartre of his intention to read Whitehead, might have seen what a good theologian he could have become.
It is necessary in theologizing to see clearly the role of analogy. Unless we are high-powered mystics and claim to intuit definitely the divine presence and its nature, we can only describe God by analogy with things, the nature of which we do directly intuit. Several analogies have been used. One is the relation of a person to that person’s experiences or ideas. Berkeley tried to make this analogy suffice. Clearly he failed. The denotation of his “notion” of persons, other persons than the self, is no mere idea but a haver of ideas, also what justifies denying the other animals as having, if not ideas, then, at least, feelings? Another analogy is the person-to-person relation, setting aside their bodies. But we are not disembodied spirits and know well we are not. Merleau-Ponty was well justified in challenging the habit of taking the mind-body relation for granted, as of minor importance. This challenge is valid, I suggest, against the habit of some computer experts of supposing that what computers do is what brains do, and we can set aside the fact that the parts of a computer (chips) are non-living. The central nervous system is not primarily there to solve problems a machine could solve. It is there to make joy, happiness, love, purpose, and beautiful freedom possible. The value of solving puzzles is contributory to those essential values, not the other way. It is no accident that mere machines are not produced by nature; nature has infinitely more glorious aims than mere puzzle-solving.
Since, without mystical insight, the question of God cannot even be discussed without analogy, it is easy to see why medieval theism, classical theism (not corrected in mainstream protestantism) failed as badly as it did (hence, so many atheists). For it tried to define God by mere negations. We are finite, God is infinite, we are relative or dependent, God wholly absolute or independent, we passive, God wholly impassable, we contingent, God wholly necessary. If we know what “not-finite” means, we certainly know what finite means, and vice-versa. Also, if everything not God is finite, then only a mystic can know what either the positive or the negative here represents. Anyway, if deity is a mere negation, why is it to be worshipped or loved with all our being? And why call God Creator or first cause? Surely these terms are positive. Or why call God good? Is mere nothingness good or beautiful? Some Hindus call it bliss, something wholly beyond love as a relational term. Similarly, Aristotle. But no high religion, even Buddhism, really consistently adheres to this negativism. Verbal cheating still occurs, so far as some of us can see.
If mere negation will not do to define God, and if God, too, must be finite as well as infinite, or dependent as well as independent, then, to avoid contradiction, the two poles must apply to the preeminent reality in diverse aspects. This divine duality was strongly hinted at by Plato, but ignored by Aristotle and countless followers, some still among us. Whitehead’s two Natures of God are a return to Plato, insufficiently conscious of itself as such.
The requirement of non-mystical ways of distinguishing God from all else, or of defining the word God, not what the word denotes — nothing actual can be exhaustively defined, least of all God — implies that there must be both a divine and a worldly version of the ultimate contrasts. In this way, we reach the definition of reality in its entirety as AR.ra, or IF.fi, where capital letters refer to God and lower case letters to worldly entities. Take AR, meaning God is both absolute and relative, absolute in prehensive adequacy and all-inclusiveness, relative in the concrete contributions that worldly freedoms make to the aesthetic richness of the prehensions. Our prehensions are never adequate to our prehended worldly past; and we depend on that past not only for some of the concrete richness of our prehensions but our very existence was made possible by that past, whereas God’s mere existence as AR obtains no matter what particular worlds exist. However, we experience both dependence and independence because, now that we do exist, we do so independently of the details of the worldly future; also, we never will depend for anything that we have been upon what happens after our death, whereas God, the uniquely immortal one, will depend for some aesthetic values on what happens no matter when in the future.
That there must be both divine and worldly finitude does not prevent us from distinguishing God from all else. You and I are vastly less than merely finite, we are tiny fragments of the finite. Only the finitude of the entire cosmos in space is that of the divine body as now constituted. The divine prehensions, however, are not reducible to what is divinely prehended. As Plato said, soul includes and surpasses body, and this is more literally true in the divine application because of the adequacy of divine prehending.
It is just not true that categorical duality cannot distinguish divine from nondivine reality, even though both poles of the ultimate contrasts apply to God and non-God. It is how they apply that makes the difference. As a reminder, but not definition, of this difference, I invert the order from AR to ra. This does not alter the numerical totality of mathematically possible combinations, counting the zero application (neither pole applying), as 16 optional views, no two of which can be, but one of which must be true. This is the only logical and indeed mathematical key ever proposed, so far as I know, to the options involved in discussions pro and con about the question of God. From Plato on, had human thinkers been a bit superhuman, they might have been discussing this 16-fold table. That this did not happen shows how far from correct is the idea that the history of metaphysics has exhausted what can reasonably be said. All the time, the issues had been very incompletely identified. Until recently, nearly the whole crowd was behind Plato. Whitehead was more right than he knew when he described Western philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato. Whitehead not only rejected Plato’s world-soul idea, he also does not mention Plato’s use of “self-moved” as criterion for the presence of mind.
CH 09-21-90 rev’d.
HyC