Charles Hartshorne Interviewed by Larry Geibel
March, 1979
LG: How did you first become interested in philosophy? Was there a special experience from life that originally stimulated you to become involved with it or that propelled you in this direction?
Hartshorne: It was a series of four or five experiences. I was brought up to be a pious Christian. But I read Matthew Arnold’s book, Literature and Dogma, when I was still in boarding school. That book is a sharp criticism of conventional Christianity. It startled me at the time. Then I went to Haverford College, and there was Rufus Jones. He was a Quaker mystic, a philosopher, and a kind of prophet. He was the most prophetic Quaker they had. And I heard him over and over. I took a course with him on Christian Doctrine, and he was very philosophical. Really! At the same time he was a kind of Christian.
Then I got into the army. But just before that I had read H.G. Wells’ book, Mr. Britling Sees It Through, and that’s theological. For a time Wells was a kind of theist, a William James’ finite God theist. So I read this, and it was very interesting. It convinced me for a while, but then I got more skeptical about it. I got into the army and had-two years of army life in the medical corps. I had sneaked some books in my army bag. So I had a library, and I read a little bit of philosophy. I began to think about philosophical problems and came to a couple of convictions on philosophical issues. I became an idealist instead of a materialist or a dualist. I became a kind of vaguely monistic philosopher in contrast to a radical pluralist. So that was settled.
Then I knew I was going to Harvard. I had made up my mind to that anyway. I decided to go into philosophy there, because I wanted to find out what was known. I hadn’t read any history of philosophy, practically speaking. So I wanted to know. That’s how I got into it.
LG: Do you remember the first paper on philosophy that you wrote?
Hartshorne: Yes, it was under Hocking, Hocking’s famous metaphysics seminar. He put the question of monism versus pluralism. I argued that you couldn’t make a proper relation of self-interest and altruism without a monistic metaphysics. With certain qualifications I still think so. Hocking liked that paper. He agreed with me.
LG: What did Hocking mean by monism and pluralism, and how does this bring about a “proper relation of self-interest and altruism?”
Hartshorne: Something like the following. The pluralist says that there are many things and persons, but no one thing or person that includes all the others. The monist says there is a thing or person that includes all things and persons. The pluralist finds altruism to be a problem: “Why should I do things for others?” One answer is: “Because if I do so, they will do things for me.” This makes altruism a pretence. One is really acting only for oneself and using the other as means. Another answer is: “It gives me pleasure to do things for others, so my aim is my own enjoyment.” Again the other is used as means.
To find a genuine role for altruism, one nest transcend the pluralism of many persons. If all persons are somehow included in a supreme person or spiritual unity, one may then perhaps be able to view the good of that supreme person as the end to which one’s own happiness and the other’s happiness are contributory.
The classical view that one should love God with all one’s being implies this if it has any clear meaning at all. To work this out adequately, I have come to realize—with the help of Whitehead and Buddhism—it is necessary to relativize the notion of personal self-identity. The ordinary pluralist has in one sense too monistic a view of an individual’s career, which is, so tc say, more pluralistic than most pluralists realize. Myself as a child, a childish self, is not my present self. The childish self no longer exists, except in memory, or in the mind of Cod who sees all and forgets nothing. My present self will soon not exist either except in the same sense. When I am dead it will exist only in rapidly fading human memory and in the mind of God. So in the end all my value, all of it, is my contribution to the divine life. This was vaguely my position even before I studied philosophy at Harvard or knew about Whitehead or Buddhism.
LG: Tell me some things about your childhood that you can remember and are fond of.
Hartshorne: Well, there are a great many things. I have no very unhappy memories. I think that may be unusual. I don’t remember any great frustrations at all. I’ve had worse ones since I grew up. But I remember with pleasure when I was ten years old, the exhilaration of getting on my bicycle and riding out into the country all by myself. I felt free to go anywhere. But I had a simple rule that kept me from getting lost. At each fork in the road, I would either always turn to the right or always turn to the left. And I figured that would bring me back eventually, which it did. And I enjoyed that!
LG: Apparently at one time you wanted to be a poet. What changed your mind about this?
Hartshorne: Well, I want to mention a childhood experience which was very Wordsworthian: a feeling, an incredible feeling, of oneness with nature, as I was directly experiencing nature. I’ve always understood Wordsworth. I had an operation for appendicitis when I was eighteen. The operation was delayed too long. It was a mistake of my father’s. He wouldn’t let the surgeon operate when he wanted to. The result was that I had a perforated appendix. It should have killed me. There were no antibiotics in those days. Luckily I survived.
I found myself in a curious condition: Perhaps it was the ether. I had also gone without food for several days while they were waiting to decide to operate. So I was more or less starved. And you know the Indians used to have visions when they went without food. Well, I got into a beautiful state in which I with closed eyes could see beautiful landscapes flow by me. Never have I experienced that before or since as vividly as that.
And then pretty soon as I was convalescing in the hospital I started to write poetry, which I had never done before. I was eighteen, and it was a Wordsworthian kind of poetry about nature. So I wrote poetry for several years. I read poetry, lots of it. I wanted to be one of the great poets.
But I found out more and more that my interest in philosophy was increasing and even coming into my poetry. My poetry was becoming more philosophical and less poetic. I was busy studying philosophy, so I finally dropped writing poetry. In a sense it was a real sacrifice, because I really still have some feeling I’d like to have been a poet. You can’t do everything. I just gradually saw that I was more interested in philosophical arguments stated in prose.
LG: As a graduate student at Harvard, you found yourself studying with such famous men as William Hocking, Ralph Perry, and C.I. Lewis, just to name a few. Among them who do you think played the greatest influence upon you at that time in your life?
Hartshorne: At first Hocking. His views were more like mine. I was already a kind of idealist. But in the long run—see, I was four years a student at Harvard, undergraduate and graduate—in the long run, I think Perry had maybe as much influence as Hocking. His views were so different from mine. It was a challenge. He’d challenge you to be clear and to argue rationally.
C.I. Lewis, the famous logician, was a very fascinating man. He was more than a logician, he was a great logician. They still talk about his ideas a lot. He was a pretty good general philosopher, and a very charming teacher. I had more courses with him than any of the others. So he may have influenced me more.
LG: Did Heidegger have any influence on you when you studied with him as a post-doctorate student in Germany in 1925?
Hartshorne: He must have had some. But you see, I had been exposed first to Husserl, then to Heidegger. I could understand what Husserl was driving at, I thought, fairly completely. However, I was skeptical of his basic approach. Heidegger was more mysterious, and it was not so clear what he was driving at. In part he was a critic of Husserl who had been his teacher. I thought his criticisms were mostly sound where he differed from Husserl. But he didn’t positively appeal to me. He was a queer fish. I still rather dislike his way of going at things, and rather dislike him.
LG: Among the famous philosophers from history, who is your favorite, and why does this one stand out so strongly in your mind?
Hartshorne: Well, if I had to choose one in the whole history, I’d probably have to say Plato. But in modern times, I would say Leibniz or Whitehead. Yet I’m partial to Charles Peirce, Henri Bergson, and William James. Plato is a unique combination of fascinating writer, religious mystic, dramatist, humorist, historian of ideas, moralist, and logician. He knows how subtle philosophical problems are, how beset they are with ambiguities and difficulties of language. I like him least as a political theorist, and hold that, like Greeks in general, he failed to see the ultimacy of the social structure of experience and reality and of love as response to the freedom of others, of being influenced as well as of influencing. The Greeks over exalted the absolute (or being) which is always an abstraction, and they underestimated the relative (or becoming) which alone is concrete. They thought too meanly of love. This is even more true of Aristotle.
LG: Who do you think is the greatest thinker of all times, the most original you might say?
Hartshorne: Oh again, I might have to say Plato. Leibniz had tremendous originality, and so did Peirce and Whitehead. If you mean who was the closest to truth, I think Whitehead. But he had the advantage of looking back on the whole history of philosophy.
LG: Do you have a favorite book of philosophy?
Hartshorne: I don’t know whether I do. Process and Reality of Whitehead, maybe. It’s a somewhat unsatisfactory book in some ways. His other book, Adventure of Ideas, is more readable and has some very fine things in it. I can’t think of any other book besides Process and Reality that stands out for me to a great extent.
LG: How do you feel about the work of Paul Weiss?
Hartshorne: I think Weiss is a great man. He has done a dozen different things, all of them with some success. But the one thing he’d like most to be considered great in—metaphysics—well, I’m not so sure. He’s interesting and certainly original. He could claim to be more original than I am, because there’s nobody he really agrees with very far. I think I’ve learned more from Peirce and Whitehead and more from the history of philosophy than he has. Like I said, he’s certainly original, but originality is not the only measure of value. When it comes to analytic clarity, he’s rather weak.
LG: How do you feel about Ludwig Wittgenstein?
Hartshorne: Well, like Heidegger, that’s another queer fish. In a way it’s the extreme version of British caution and suspicion of speculation. Funny, he’s an Austrian, and he’s more British than the British in some ways. It’s the ultimate in positivism or scepticism. All we know about reality is what everyday life teaches nearly everybody that keeps his head, or what science finds out. Philosophy can’t add much more except maybe a little bit about language, how language works. I don’t care much for the idea that philosophy has no function except to cure its own mistakes.
LG: Are there any weaknesses in philosophy in this day and age?
Hartshorne: I think linguistic analysis has been somewhat sterile. These people have spent a lot of time on trivial points about how to use words. Basically there’s a lot of truth in what they say. Much metaphysics has been misuse of language, I agree with that. But they seem to think that defines metaphysics. I don’t think it does. I think it only defines bad metaphysics.
LG: Speaking of metaphysics, what future developments do you see possibly taking place?
Hartshorne: The most important thing that needs to be done is to mediate between what has been accomplished in metaphysics in the last hundred years or so and the latest problems emerging in the sciences, in neurophysiology—about the mind-body problem—and in cosmology. See, Whitehead’s physics is now fifty years out of date. Fully! He stopped studying physics when he went into metaphysics. So the question is: “Granted there’s a lot of truth in Whitehead’s metaphysics, how does it relate to the present state of the sciences?” Whitehead wasn’t in a position to talk to that point. The other thing is he didn’t do a great deal with the social sciences or with psychology. He didn’t do a great deal with ethical problems: I think he had the basic insights, but he didn’t work them out. Process philosophers need to do more ethics and more social science. They’re trying to do it.
LG: What about theology and its future, are there any new signs of progress here?
Hartshorne: Well, I’m convinced that some version of process theology is the only hope for the future. More and more people who are theologians are seeing that. That movement has been slowly increasing as long as I have been in it. Every week you learn about new people that are taking it out to its theological conclusions.
LG: You hardly ever mention or use the word “being” in your metaphysics. In every case you prefer the word “becoming” rather than that of “being.” Why?
Hartshorne: Well, because being suggests a sharp contrast with becoming. I thought that Heidegger made a mistake when he talks about being, because he really talks about becoming, as far as I can figure it out. He’s a process metaphysician, if he’s anything. You see, I prefer the word “reality.” Reality is whatever makes our opinions about it true. It’s that which is what it is whatever human beings happen to think about it. If we think rightly about it, then our beliefs are true.
Another word we need to use is “actuality.” Being contrasts with becoming. To identify reality with being begs the question of whether reality is basically static or basically non-static, basically creative. It affects the question of creativity. Whereas, actuality contrasts with possibility. That’s a clear contrast, actual-possible. But being-becoming, that’s not a clear contrast. What’s the being of past events? I would say they have being now that they have happened and you can have true opinions about them. They are realities from now on, and yet their past case would be instances of becoming. So I think the word being tends to beg the whole question in favor of a traditional bias against becoming, which you find in Asia as well as in the West.
LG: Neoclassical theology holds the view that not only does God experience our experiences but remembers them as well. For you, like Whitehead before you, God is divine consciousness including divine memory. However, isn’t this position strictly an anthropomorphic projection based on man’s way of reasoning?
Hartshorne: Well, one of the things I like about Peirce is he says that whether we like it or not, our thought is anthropomorphic. The only question is whether it is legitimately anthropomorphic, whether it’s the right anthropomorphism. In other words, all our thinking is human thinking. The only adequate or nearly adequate model we have of reality has to be ourselves. The question is just how you stretch this analogy between ourselves and the things we’re trying to understand—whether you stretch it far enough. So I’m not frightened by that term “anthropomorphic” and neither was Peirce. Peirce knew all about ‘the scientist’s desires to be objective.
LG: Is it possible to make what you might call an anthropomorphic leap away from God when philosophizing about God?
Hartshorne: I’m not sure what you mean by that. You can stop thinking about God and think about man, or you can deify the human species, the human capacities. Ever since Feuerbach that’s been done very ingeniously, so that by God we mean idealized humanity. It’s just an idealistic way to look at our own species. I think you can do that, but our species is one pebble on the beach. So I don’t respond very much to the notion of deifying humanity. For one thing we’re all mortal, and I view the species as mortal. In fact, there’s no question the species is mortal in this sense: that nobody could ever know that it will last forever. There’s no way that could ever be known, it seems to me.
LG: Over the last fifty years you’ve seen the rise and fall of several philosophical -isms. In particular have any of them directly or indirectly affected the results of your personal work?
Hartshorne: Well, pragmatism certainly has, but it’s a little older than fifty years. Pragmatism has definitely influenced me. I agree with pragmatists on this basic doctrine: that unless an idea can in some sense be expressed by how we live, it’s superfluous, it’s empty. That alone is enough reason for rejecting classical theism, because classical theism said all possible value is fully actual in God. The only corollary I see from that is it doesn’t matter what we do because all possible value is actualized. That reduces all our efforts to nonsense. That to me is quite enough of a basis to reject it. It would be a truth you couldn’t live by. You could only pretend to live by it. You’ve got to go on thinking that some possible values aren’t actualized. That means there’s something God doesn’t have that He could have. Because, if it were actual, if He’s supposed to know everything, then He would have it.
LG: You leave out existentialism. What about it?
Hartshorne: I think that my version of pragmatism is existential. You have got to be able to live by it. It seems to me that’s the soundest thing in existentialism. As a doctrine existentialism is sometimes taken to mean that there can be no systematic work in philosophy, no system. But that seems to be a dubious point. I would say Whitehead, Peirce, and Bergson were all existential in the most important questions. They thought they could live by their philosophy.
LG: Would the statement, “I experience, therefore I am,” be the chief motto of your ideas?
Hartshorne: Well, I’ve never been much interested in that formula, “I experience, therefore I am,” because that brings in the question of the ego which is a very subtle question. What Descartes proved clearly to my mind is that whatever else is certain, it’s certain that there are experiences. But the question what do I mean by “I”, that’s a subtle thing. And I don’t start with that.
LG: What do you start with?
Hartshorne: Experience. I now am certain of my reality. But in what sense is that identical to the same entity as what I call my self in childhood? Descartes even thought this was an immortal being. I’ve no interest in that kind of thing.
LG: Would you object to someone calling or labelling your philosophy as “feelingism” even though it often goes by the name “psychicalism?”
Hartshorne: Yeah, it does universalize the concept of feeling. You could also say sensing. Every creature is sentient. I think there’s a truth that Whitehead tried to express when he said that there’s a very tenuous, universal concept of mentality which also applies to every creature. But this mentality is a sense which may be very minimal in many creatures. Open possibilities for the future—there’s a sense that there might be this instead of that, or there is in fact that instead of this—that’s the most basic meaning of mentality. Put it in another way: feeling is a response to what has happened. That refers to the past, but there is a sense of the future. Ultimately, experience is creative of the future. It’s deciding of the future in view of the actual past. The idea of meaning—that we refer to more than is actual—that’s the principle of saying we have a future. The future is not yet actual, yet we are concerned with it. Every creature has at least a minimal concern with the future.
LG: You’ve written: “Where I say feeling of feeling, or Whitehead says feeling of feeling, you could say experience of experience.”
Hartshorne: That’s true, I have written that.
LG: Are you implying here that experience and feeling are metaphysically the same thing, or do they have differences in meaning?
Hartshorne: I would say, “Without feeling there certainly can be no thought.” The notion of a purely intellectual being is meaningless. Whitehead even talks about intellectual feelings. Thinking is in a way a development of feeling, rather than feeling a special case of thinking. The lower animals have hardly any thinking, but they all have feelings.
LG: Throughout your long career as a philosopher, what do you think has been the most difficult problem for you to philosophize about?
Hartshorne: How to relate metaphysics and physics. Relativity physics and quantum physics are pretty difficult problems. But I think the most mysterious, puzzling thing is the tension between saying that God has to be conceived analogously to ourselves, and on the other hand, saying His experience has to be all inclusive—has to be clear and distinct—whereas ours is always more or less vague and indistinct. It has to be infallible, whereas ours is always fallible. We can’t have a very distinct image in our minds of what this infallible, inclusive consciousness can be like. It’s so radically different from ours.’ I’m one hundred per cent convinced that Anselm is entirely right, that if we know what we mean by God, we know whether or not God exists. But the whole question is how far we know what we mean by God. That is the whole question about religion. I haven’t been able to convince any large number of philosophers of that, but I’m thoroughly convinced of it myself.
There’s an acute problem if you give up the classical view that God’s consciousness is simply timeless. So there’s a kind of open future to God. God is protean He’s acquiring new knowledge from moment to moment. It’s not obvious at all how to relate that to relativity Physics, which denies that there’s any single cosmic present dividing the cosmic past from the cosmic future.
There’re several theories as to how you can relate God who is in a sense in process to this. There is one view in quantum physics which would solve the problem as far as theology is concerned. According to this view, all the events in the world occur in a single series, one by one. God would only have to relate Himself to each of these events as it happens. The view is sharply in conflict with relativity physics, although a lot of relativity physics would still hold. It’s a complicated issue, but the view simplifies the problem for process theology and for my neoclassical theology. Only one physicist that I know, Henry Stapp, has accepted it. He calls his position a “revised Whiteheadianism.” It implies that with virtually infinitesimal loss of time an event, no matter how remote in the universe, can influence what happens right here. It makes space a very strange thing. Yet I’m not sure that it’s impossible. I don’t see any theological objections to it. It has other advantages as well.
LG: In effect, do you think you have fully expressed your metaphysical views in such away that it completely and accurately describes the real world as much as we know it now?
Hartshorne: Well, hardly. I can’t be very confident of my understanding of physics when it gets closer and closer to metaphysics, things that are essentially metaphysical problems. As long as I have this limited understanding, this limited capacity in mathematics, I can’t be altogether confident that I know what I’m talking about in that aspect.
LG: In Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method you write: “Probably the most important function of metaphysics is to help in whatever way it can to enlighten and encourage man in his agonizing political and religious predicaments.” I’m not sure what you mean by that. How can metaphysics help man in his agonizing political and religious predicaments? Could you elaborate this for me?
Hartshorne: Well, the political, goodness, there’s the whole question of war. If it isn’t a philosopher who should help in that, who should it be? Yet I don’t know how much philosophers have helped. Kant tried to deal with the problem very directly, but that’s a long time ago. Since then Josiah Royce tried. He had a scheme for international insurance he thought would give every nation tremendous economic incentive to keep the peace. Nobody seems to know what to do with that question. It’s a terrible question, and I don’t think philosophy has done very well with it so far. I don’t see that Whitehead contributed much to it. So there’s a big gap.
On the religious question, I really think process theology is on the right track. But there’s always this dilemma that people want contradictory things from religion. They want a God who will protect them and guarantee their security, and so on. But they don’t realize that the other side of the thing is that they want to make their own decisions. Well, if you have freedom in the creatures, you have an element of chance, an element of risk, an element of possible conflict and chaos, and so on. You can’t have complete security and freedom in the same world. Nobody wants to really give up all freedom and have God determine everything in their thinking.
Furthermore, it’s a rather natural weakness, as I see it, for human beings to want to be like God in being immortal, so that death is only the apparent end to their careers. That is a mistake. I think we ought to serve God between birth and death and be satisfied with that. Let God be the immortal being. We’re immortal because we’ve contributed ourselves to the divine life. But how soon can you get people to really accept this, that’s the question. They like to dream of meeting their lost friends and loved ones again and all that. So you have people who want contradictory things from religion. The philosopher can only try to encourage people to transcend this weakness.
LG: Nowadays do you think people have more faith or less faith in philosophy as a way of life?
Hartshorne: There’s a very substantial portion of the population who do not have faith in any traditional religious view. Yet they can’t simply dismiss religion and have nothing of the kind, nothing to take its place. As long as that’s true, they’re going to have to have some faith in some kind of philosophy, or just be in a pretty hopeless state. Of course, the existentialists tried to say you don’t need faith in anything except maybe yourself or humanity. I’m not very impressed when people like Sartre and Camus say life is absurd, nevertheless, we’ll go ahead and try to live sensibly and nobly. I don’t know what that means. I think by their act of living—by trying to live sensibly and nobly—they are implying that life has a meaning, even though they verbally deny it.
LG: Recently you set about revising Peirce’s categories of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. Precisely what constitutes your latest revision of these categories?
Hartshorne: After reflecting for more than fifty years on these categories, I have come to the conviction that Peirce’s views about them are a mixture of penetrating insights and partial oversights. I agree with Peirce that first and second, or the numbers one and two—taken as ordinal numbers—express a basic philosophic idea. Secondness expresses dependence. If it’s the second thing, there must have been a first thing, but if it’s the first thing, there may never be a second thing. So those two numbers, taken as ordinal numbers, express the ideas of independence and dependence, and I agree that that’s absolutely right. But Peirce distinguishes firstness from secondness and these from thirdness by the number of things on which something depends or doesn’t depend. If it depends on zero other things, he calls it firstness. If it depends on one other thing, he calls it secondness. If it depends on two other things, he calls it thirdness. He says there’s no need to go on, because you can reduce the more complicated cases to thirdness.
Now I say it’s not the number of things on which something depends that matters. Firstness ought to mean independence of at least something. It doesn’t have to mean independence of everything.
Hardly anything is independent of everything. That removes it from the realm of the concrete altogether. Only something extremely abstract can be independent of everything, and Peirce virtually admits this. I think we should be looking for relations among concrete realities. So firstness, in my view, simply means the relation or nonrelation that a phenomenon has to certain other phenomena. If it is independent of at least some other phenomena, then, in that context, it is a case of firstness. But the same thing may depend on still other things, and in relation to those other things it’s a case of secondness.
So the same thing can both be a first and a second, but not in the same respect or with reference to the same other things. That gives you two categories. Dependence ought to be something, and independence ought to be something. Now there is a third category. Peirce is right: there are three and only three of these ideas. The first item is something between sheer dependence and sheer independence. There is such a thing, and it’s our relation to the future)which is very important in Peirce.
He believes in an open future. The future is not strictly implied in the present in the sense that later actualities are not strictly implied. He is not a determinist. He believes in real chance, in an element of indeterminancy. Yet something of the future is implied, and the present couldn’t be what it is unless there were a future, unless it was guaranteed that something was going to happen next, and something after that, and so on. The whole meaning of the present depends on there being a future which will be realized somehow. Well, that relation is between sheer dependence and sheer independence, and it’s a relation of probability, it’s a relation of law, as a Tychist understands law.
Peirce’s philosophy of time is very clear. He says time is objective modality, that the past is necessary given the present, and the future is contingent given the present.
Nevertheless, there’s probability toward the future. So that’s not firstness, that’s not secondness, that’s thirdness. It’s the relation to the future. That’s why thirdness involves law, generality, and universals. You can’t point to future particulars, there are none to point to. So it seems to me this clarifies a basic confusion in Peirce. It’s not really important how many things something depends on. All past events are causal conditions of the present. So the present depends on them all, maybe an infinite number. Counting how many it depends on, that’s beside the point. Yet he is right. There are only three categories.
LG: How and in what way do you manage to reduce the twenty-seven categories of Whitehead in Process and Reality to Peirce’s three categories.
Hartshorne: Peirce said that his system of categories was not the only one you need. He never could work out the others. I guess he’s right, they’re not the only ones you need. Firstness is the relation to later phenomena. Thirdness is the relation to the future as such, as neither later phenomena in their particularity nor just nothing, but something in between, which is the probability, the approximate causal order of the world. Secondness, understood in the way I understand it, is about the same as Whitehead’s prehension. Whitehead interprets it as feeling of feeling, and there’s good Peircean ground for doing that.
So you have got the idea of feeling, you’ve got the idea of causality, because you can’t feel a feeling unless it already exists. So that gives you causal conditions of the present, and the relation to the future gives you whatever causal order there is. so you’ve got quite a lot. But, for example, how would you contrast higher and lower creatures, or how would you contrast all the creatures with God, let’s say? You need concepts of value, and I don’t see that the three categories give you value. So you must have other concepts. The three categories give you the causal and the spatial and temporal structure of the world in principle, but that isn’t everything. Some of Whitehead’s categories are value categories. They’re aesthetic principles. Every actual entity has to achieve a certain harmony in contrast.
LG: What would be equivalent to thirdness in Whitehead?
Hartshorne: “Mentality” is one aspect of it, and what he calls order, which he says is basically aesthetic. But the aesthetic principles applying to it are not to be derived from thirdness.
LG: Would creativity be firstness or thirdness?
Hartshorne: Creativity, now there’s a question. Creativity is the whole business of how the categories are interrelated, because any phenomenon is an instance. The actuality of any phenomenon which will involve a secondness with the past and a probability toward the future, that would be an instance of creativity. Now Peirce talks about spontaneity, and that’s why there’s creativity, though he doesn’t analyze it nearly as far and doesn’t show you just how it’s related to his categories. I don’t think he ever discusses that.
LG: I have one final question. If you happen to go down in the history of philosophy as one of the great philosophers of our time, what would you wish most to be remembered for?
Hartshorne: There are a fair number of things. I think I’ve analyzed the logical problems centering on the question of theism—the idea of God, the existence of God–I think I’ve given a much more thorough analysis of that than anybody else. It’s summed up more or less by what I call “dual transcendence”: that God is unique not only as cause but also as effect, not only as unity but also as diversity. You go through all the basic contrasts, God is preeminent on both sides of those contrasts. That fits what Whitehead says pretty well, but he didn’t say it.
I’d like to be remembered for stressing the importance of asymmetrical and nonsymmetrical concepts as more fundamental in a way than symmetrical ones. That’s involved in the modal structure of time. For example, the relation of events to their predecessors is quite different logically from the relation to their successors. The creative process of the world is not analogous to propositions each of which is equivalent to every other. It’s analogous to the constant production of new premises, which cannot be derived from the old. But the old can always be derived from the new, so it’s a one way business. The causal structure of the world is analogous to the logical structure of “p” entails “q”, where normally “q” does not entail “p”. One is the relation to the past, the other is the relation to the future.
My first book on sensation has no competitor. It’s the only book that deals with sensation as a problem in psychology and philosophy, and distinguishes it from problems of perception. What is sensory quality—sweet, sour, red, blue, bitter—just what is that? Various philosophers have taken positions, but they never wrote an elaborate analysis of what and why. So that’s a unique book. Paul Weiss has sometimes said that it’s my best book. That’s one of the most important things I might be remembered for.
I also claim to have discovered that if virtues are means (between extremes), so is beauty. Aesthetic values can be analyzed in terms of fixed contrary extremes and a golden mean between them. That’s unique. You can’t find that anywhere else. There is also this: Whitehead is accused of stating his beliefs rather than arguing for them; insofar as I agree with those beliefs (not with all of them) I argue a good deal for their truth. I have a somewhat similar relation to Bergson and Peirce.
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