Conclusion to Creativity in American Philosophy
Charles Hartshorne
American philosophy, from Edwards to Peirce and Whitehead, constitutes a success story from the standpoint of neoclassical metaphysics. The problem of causality and freedom has been redefined in terms of self-determining experience that furnishes content for its later instances. The “furnishing content” aspect is the causal conditioning. Peirce was nearly clear about this, Whitehead was essentially clear. The mind-matter problem is in principle solved by the same idea, taking into account the Leibnizian distinction between imperceptibly small active singulars and their aggregates and also that between low and high levels of experiencing.
The problem of God is, if not solved, at least greatly alleviated by the conception of Deity as the eminent form of finally self-determining experience, grasping as its content already actualized experiences. The principle of dual transcendence (toward which Channing, Royce, James, Peirce, Brightman, Hocking, and others seem to have been groping) then applies, since God as experiencing the world must be, insofar, relative and changeable rather than merely eternal, absolute, or independent. The abstract defining characteristics of deity are indeed independent or absolute, strictly necessary and eternal. These defining characteristics include an eminent or divine kind of relativity and changeability. In this matter Peirce is somewhat unclear, but he does hint strongly that God is not in an unqualified sense immutable. Whitehead definitely implies that God has an “infinite” and “absolute,” but also a “finite” (and relative) aspect, the one primordial and changeless, the other in its specific content “consequent” and “in flux.”
In the United States, as in a number of other countries, there has in recent times been a slow approach to the dipolar or dually transcendent conception. Brightman’s defence of the finite-infinite, temporal-eternal God was one twentieth-century instance of this, preceded by Channing’s vaguer qualification of the divine infinity, and by various hints in Peirce’s discussions of the idea of God. James knew that sheer infinity or absoluteness was not the answer to the question, “What is the divine nature?” However, his empiricism gave him no clue to the required qualification. Brightman called his view empirical but lacked a sharp criterion for the application of this term. He assumed that God must definitely have eternal and infinite aspects to be the God of the high religions—but then, some might object, perhaps the high religions ask more of reality than reality provides. To deal with this objection, more than empiricism is required.
Thinking of the American writers who, before Whitehead, tried to find a remedy for the notorious logical problems of classical theism, or the notorious logical problems of historical idealisms, I recall Santayana’s Winds of Doctrine, and the conclusion of its first chapter:
“These are but gusts of doctrine, yet they prove that the spirit is not dead in the lull between its seasons of steady blowing. Who knows which of them may not gather force presently and carry the mind of the age steadily before it?”
Perhaps Santayana overestimated the capacity of our twentieth century culture to arrive at a consensus. It is true that Wittgenstein’s thought seems to some to give a definitive direction to recent philosophizing, and Heidegger so appears to others. Rorty, who has learned from them and from McKeon’s historicism, is impressive to some, Wilfrid Sellars to others. If we must settle for a nontheistic view, then I question if Dewey and Mead have been surpassed. In their vein is Charles W. Morris’s Paths of Life. Like many Americans, including Montague, Morris was aware of the challenge of Buddhism. Somehow it is not for nothing that the waves of the Pacific beat upon one of our principal shores.
Many Unitarian clergymen are trying to foster life in their religious communities without benefit of a definite idea of God. Considering the complexities and subtleties of our cultural situation in its bearing on the theistic question, one cannot wonder that this should be so. As Montague nicely put it, a theist should not look upon the efforts of such humanist thinkers with hostility. Rather, one should admire their courage in a difficult situation. Without the inspiration of a definite belief in divine love, they are trying to achieve an adequate love for their human fellows and to derive as much inspiration as they can from science, the arts, and the history of human greatness and nobility. Belief is a gift, a blessing, or an achievement, not a duty one can simply demand that all should perform. What may be a duty is that one should not “bar the path of inquiry” (Peirce), including inquiry into the pros as well as the cons of the metaphysical belief that is theism and into the relative merits of various formulations, new as well as old, of this belief.
On the question of method, I have at least some slight quarrel with all the persons I have discussed. I agree with Parker, Emerson, and Royce in acknowledging a priori metaphysical elements in knowledge and valuation (the English poet Coleridge, with his Aids to Reflection—American edition in 1828—was influential here); but I miss in them an adequate grasp of the empirical elements. The total denial of contingency, implicit in Emerson and at best only ambiguously and consistently avoided by Edwards, also close to the surface in Royce, makes the inadequacy clear. The unconditionally necessary could not be known empirically, nor could the contingent be known a priori. What could be known a priori is that the category of contingency necessarily has some instances or other, so that it is an a priori truth that some truths must be known, if at all, empirically. This applies even to God’s knowledge. God could not, in spite of Thomas Aquinas, know the contingent world by intuiting the eternal and necessary divine essence. Rather, God must directly perceive the contingent creatures by contingent acts of prehension.
In Peirce and Whitehead the empirical aspects of knowledge are fully recognized. It is perhaps less clear what for them is not empirical. They seem not to make explicit use of Popper’s criterion, the most useful one of all, for empirical statements, that they are those to the falsity of which some but not all conceivable experiences could testify. Peirce virtually uses this criterion in explicating the rationale of induction but not in explicating the terms ‘empirical’ or ‘a priori.’ Whitehead puts no special stress on falsification. He seems sometimes to imply that metaphysics is merely the most general form of empirical inquiry. Like Peirce, he thinks of metaphysics as “descriptive” of the most general data of experience, those common to all conceivable experiences. But by Popper’s valuable definition, knowledge of these data, since it is unfalsifiable by conceivable experience, is nonempirical. Its truth is that of pure reason, as Kant would have it.
Is such truth synthetic a priori? I agree partly with Quine but partly also with Camap here. What is analytic or synthetic depends somewhat on how we arrange our language. What is, in one linguistic framework, synthetic a priori may also, by meaning postulates, be made analytic. Judgment as to what meaning postulates are legitimately used in this way is precisely the metaphysical question. I hold with Peirce that it is an ideal to arrange our language so that objectively necessary or merely possible relations appear respectively as formally analytic or formally synthetic, and I agree with him and with Aristotle that contingent possibility and futurity are essentially one and that truths about strictly eternal aspects of reality must be objectively necessary. They are the metaphysical truths. No empirical science could establish or disprove them.
A similar distinction is required in evaluating the pragmatic criterion of meaning. James badly blurred the distinction between criterion of meaning and criterion of truth. Royce called himself an “absolute pragmatist,” and, although he didn’t say so, this meant an a priori pragmatist. All truths whatever, he seems to imply, have the same objective status logically, since all are made true by the unique, eternal, Absolute Experience. There is, for Royce, no genuine temporality, hence no genuine contingency. One was still, in Royce, with Emerson’s “There is no chance, no anarchy.” Here James was the wiser man in proclaiming, with Peirce, the reality of chance. But James tried to make his pragmatism wholly empirical and yet a criterion of truth. How badly this worked we saw in chapter 5. What James missed was that the pragmatic criterion is valid for truth as well as meaning only in application to strictly necessary and eternal aspects of reality, because in that application value and truth, being alike necessary, are equally a priori matters. In empirical applications, value is contingent upon truth, upon how the world happens to be; so that reasoning from the value of the mere idea begs the questions of both truth and value.
Peirce was largely clear about his pragmatic criterion. He made no attempt to derive contingent truth from it, although he did hint that it could be used to support the truth about noncontingent questions, such as the existence of God.
Whitehead’s pragmatism comes out at least vaguely in his definition of metaphysics (or “rationalism”) as “the search for the coherence of the presuppositions of civilized living.” He means here, presumably, the indispensable or necessary presuppositions and ideals (however poorly actualized) of any conceivable society of thinking animals. Peirce’s “critical commonsensism” is another approach to the same issue. Since there is no absolutely perfect way to express metaphysical truth in language, it will probably always be possible to argue plausibly that any particular way of doing so is unsatisfactory and that some other way would overcome certain difficulties in the given way. But the claims for a greater “openness” of Justus Buchler’s “ordinal metaphysics,” characterized by a principle of “ontological parity,” are stated in a manner that I find insufficiently impressive to tempt me to spend the effort required to master the system. To say, as Aristotle, Whitehead, and many others have done, that abstractions are real only in something concrete does not mean that, as in the concrete, they are not real. Numbers, for example, are real insofar as there are multiple concrete actualities, also insofar as there are thoughts with multiple aspects, entertained by human or superhuman actualities.
My difficulties with Weiss’s philosophy are somewhat similar to those I have with Buchler’s: Both of them seem to misplace concreteness, or confuse levels of abstractness, and to fail to find a coherent way of conceiving the inclusive reality for the sake of which alone the less inclusive realities have their significance.
Where there is no perfect method there may always be some point in trying other ways than those already tried. So Buchler’s principle of ontological parity, or idea of natural complexes, (or Weiss’s finalities) may be worth more consideration than I have given them.
On the question of political equality and sovereignty, I make more modest claims to progress in our American philosophical tradition. Our Founding Fathers were men of astonishing wisdom. But they left political problems that are still troublesome. As Mrs. John Adams pointed out, they omitted women from the scope of political equality. They also omitted Blacks. Theoretically, we have overcome the second anomaly and have made a start toward overcoming the first. However, in our practice, and in the fine points even in our theories, there is still much to be desired under both heads. It is perhaps worth noting that at least two of our philosophers explicitly conceded full rights to woman. They were Emerson and Whitehead.
The essential social problem, which is economic as much as political, and international and military as much as domestic, is today our problem of problems. It is not metaphysical, except somewhat indirectly; for it involves rather specific and contingent aspects of human life on this planet. Jefferson himself could not see how equalitarian democracy was possible in a largely urban and industrialized society; yet that is the society we now have.
That many of our philosophers (for example, Rawls and Nozick) are now focusing on ethical and political questions, especially problems of economic justice, seems in order. Ideally, there is need for a synthesis of the results of this inquiry with the metaphysics of freedom that James, Peirce, and Whitehead, have together made possible.
It is important that philosophers realize how technology has transformed value questions. It has done this by altering quantitative factors whose changes, as Marxists rightly say, bring qualitative changes with them. The simple fact, for example, that modern hygiene makes anything like a balance of birth and death rates possible today only if women bear perhaps a third as many babies as formerly alters substantially the appropriate life-styles for women in general. Many other technological changes, quantitative and in effect qualitative, go with this. The problems that Blacks as such face are also altered by these changes. And everyone’s problems are affected by the discovery of nuclear fission. Neither Jefferson nor Marx foresaw these formidable issues.
Perhaps for the near future Dewey’s focus on middle-sized ideas more than on metaphysical ultimates is appropriate. But it is also true that most people still show a need for such ultimates. In this way a diversity of concerns by philosophers, such as does actually exist, may be healthy.
If Leibniz could have been alive during the past ten decades, from whom could he have learned most, metaphysically? I think the answer is obvious: Charles Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. They were the ones who understood his problems better than he was in a position to do, with a better mathematics, logic, and physics, more comprehensive knowledge of the history of philosophy and religion, and with comparable imaginative power, intellectual daring, and lifelong devotion to intellectual pursuits. They had one more advantage over Leibniz: they knew about him, while he did not know about them. If it is really true that there is no progress in philosophy, then philosophers must be fantastically stupid. They are indeed limited and fallible—but not that stupid.
I reiterate my conviction that in metaphysics no country is in a better position than this country and that all whose language is English have ready access to an unsurpassed metaphysical tradition. This encouraging thought needs to be balanced by the sobering one that only a small minority of our population has any knowledge of our philosophical tradition. Many of our citizens are functionally illiterate in philosophy and comparative religion. In their grasp of the philosophy of religion our Founding Fathers were worlds removed from countless writers of letters to newspaper editors today. How Jefferson would have shuddered to read some of these letters! Teachers of philosophy and religion or theology have a responsibility in this regard. It will not suffice to teach only agnostic or atheistic perspectives, for most people will insist on something positive. Jefferson and Lincoln had a positive view of life and the cosmos. Marxist leaders may be able to do without belief in a superhuman cosmic reality. It is not clear that ours can do so. In any case, people have a right to know what the positive options are in their best contemporary or recent formulations. If this book increases their chances in that respect it will have attained its end.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Creativity in American Philosophy, pp. 281-287.
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