Charles Hartshorne
The thesis of this book, negatively stated, is as follows: The currently accepted principles of scientific research and explanation, as well as the most characteristic ideas of contemporary philosophy, have not as yet been applied, with the thoroughness which the problem merits, to the question of the nature and distribution of the qualities immediately given in sensation, such as “red,” “sour,” or “warm”; and as a result the conceptions still generally held regarding these qualities conflict with the recognized criteria of a fruitful scientific hypothesis, or of an acceptable philosophical idea.
The comprehension of the greatest possible range of facts under the intelligible unity of the fewest and simplest general principles, such as is sought for everywhere in science, is achieved in the prevalent psychological and philosophical theories concerning sensation only in somewhat the same unsatisfactory way as it was in the Ptolemaic astronomy or in pre-evolutionary biology. The known facts, that is to say, are summed up in a cumbersome complexity of loosely interwoven ideas, from which further facts can seldom be deduced, and some of the deductions from which actually conflict with the facts already known.
The positive statement of the thesis to be considered may be formulated thus: the application of scientific and rational principles to the sensory qualities results in a new theory of these immediate data of consciousness,” considered both in themselves and in relation to their physical stimuli, organic conditions, biological significance, and evolutionary origin. This theory is characterized by the importance which it assigns to five fundamental conceptions:
1. Mathematical continuity
2. Aesthetic meaning or affective tone
3. The fundamentally social character of experience
4. Biological adaptiveness
5. Evolution from a common origin.
If each of these conceptions be embodied in an assertion indicating roughly its significance for the theory, we have the following five theses:
1. The type of relation existing between colors, whereby one is connected with or shades into another through intermediaries, can be generalized so as to connect qualities from different senses (e.g., a color and a sound) or from different elementary classes (e.g., secondary and tertiary qualities). This is contradictory to the almost universally accepted Helmholtzian dictum1 that qualities from different sensory “modes” cannot be compared, but are irreducibly heterogeneous; further, it is the contradictory of the doctrine of the irreducible distinctness of sensory qualities and affective tones; and, finally, of the doctrine of an irreducible difference in kind between awareness and its contents.
It must, however, be noted that not all the intermediaries spoken of above are asserted to occur in actual experience. The essential point is that differences are matters of degree, whether or not all possible degrees can be found in the existent world.
2. The “affective” tonality, the aesthetic or tertiary quality, usually supposed to be merely “associated with” a given sensory quality is, in part at. least, identical with that quality, one with its nature or essence. Thus, the “gaiety” of yellow (the peculiar highly specific gaiety) is the yellowness of the yellow. The two are identical in that the “yellowness” is the unanalyzed and but denotatively identified x of which the “gaiety” is the essential description or analysis. (This description is extremely crude, vague, and partial—there is much more to be said concerning the yellowness of the yellow, and there is also this truth in the doctrine that such a quality is ineffable, namely, that a complete and perfect description of it is indeed beyond the power of language.)
Affective tone (Whitehead’s “feeling-value”) is thus the stuff of which the entire content of consciousness is composed. Although this tenet is in opposition to the prevalent associational view of aesthetic phenomena, it is shown to be compatible with the accredited facts of aesthetic association, and indeed to endow the association principle in some respects with an even greater explanatory power than that now conceded to it.
The words “affective,” “feeling,” etc., require preliminary definition. If one limits, as it is probably best to do, the term “emotion” to feelings involving marked consciousness of intrabodily activities such as are emphasized in the James-Lange theory, then a color sensation is not emotional. It may, nevertheless, resemble emotion in certain respects; these respects I group under the name “feeling.” “Affection”—pleasantness-unpleasant-ness—I regard as one among several of the respects in question, one among a number of dimensions of feeling. The failure of previous multidimensional views of feeling, such as that of Wundt, I ascribe partly to the prevalence of a non-social conception of mind, partly to the dualistic conception of sensation and feeling, and partly to the conception of non-dimensional as well as dimensional qualitative differences—in other words, to the half-hearted way in which the idea of continuity has been applied in psychology.
3. Experience is social throughout, to its uttermost fragments or “elements.” Its every mode is a mode of sociability. Thus, for example, the very objectivity or over-against-us character of sensations, particularly visual, is nothing but a certain kind of social otherness involved in them. Or, again, the “coldness” of green, the “distance” of blue, the “aggressiveness” of red, embody modes of variation fully explicable only in terms of experience conceived as a social continuum.
4. The intrinsic natures of sensory qualities, and not merely. the order and correlations in which they ‘occur, express organic attitudes, or tend, of themselves, to incite modes of behavior; and these modes may be appropriate or useful, in relation to the physical circumstances generally accompanying the occurrence of the stimuli productive of the respective sensations. Thus, of all the colors blue is intrinsically the most appropriate to adapt the human organism to the principal objects in nature (the sky, distant objects, and bodies of water), which reflect the short wave-lengths perceived as blue.
5. The first appearance of a given quality at a certain stage in evolution is not a pure “emergence” (though it has an emergent aspect) of the quality, unrelated to the previous state of nature, but is intelligible in much the same fashion as the appearance of a new organ. A primitive quality of sensation may be conceived, such that the development of more specific qualities may be made intelligible as a true development, or differentiation, rather than as a sheer displacement of the old and irruption of the new.
The acceptance, as a hypothesis, of these five theses in the organically interrelated form in which they constitute, as will be shown, one coherent theory makes possible a binding-together of the results of many distinct lines of inquiry, embracing pure geometry, aesthetics, everyday social experience, biology, metaphysics, and religious experience, into a sweeping generalization capable of manifold empirical verifications as well as applicable to the clarification of numerous philosophical paradoxes. The merits claimed for the theory, however, may all be summed up in one—that it opens the way to the observation and explanation of facts hitherto unobserved or supposed inexplicable.” The ultimate appeal is to the principle upon which all scientific progress depends: the employment of mathematical forms to aid in the observation and reduction to intelligible unity of the perceptual facts, guided by the one universally valid axiom so well formulated by Charles Peirce, “Do not block the path of experiential inquiry,” together with its corollary, “No fact is to be supposed inexplicable.”
If any other theory can lead the way to the conceptual unification of so great a range of observable facts, while successfully avoiding the baptizing of mysteries as “ultimate,” of problems as “insoluble,” of entities as “unanalyzable,” “inexplicable,” mere brute facts, then may that theory be preferred to the one hereinafter propounded. This may be summarily designated as the theory of the contents of sensation as forming an “affective continuum” of aesthetically meaningful, socially expressive, organically adaptive and evolving experience functions.
The designation “affective” for the whole continuum of experiences indicates that all qualitative contrasts, in whatever dimension, repeat recognizably the contrasts characteristic of affection in its typical cases, so that these contrasts may be said to generate the continuum. Such polarities are joy and sorrow, self and not-self, liking and disliking, etc.
The primacy of affection may also be expressed as follows: the clue to the observational detection of all relationships upon the continuum is the comparison of all entities thereon to those examples of affectivity which in psychology are most clearly and. unanimously recognized as such. The doctrine of the dualism of sense and affection inhibits such comparison by asserting the incomparability of the two factors—a type of negative hypothesis which is the exact reverse of one scientifically fruitful or legitimate. If, therefore, anyone should fear that the word “affective” as extended to include sensation becomes thereby emptied of its usual meaning, this reference to observational signification (“operational,” as the physicist would say) may serve as the answer. I am content to accept the verbally opposite doctrine, that affection is really a species of sensation, provided only that this be taken to mean equal abundance of observable analogies between the two, without denial or neglect of whatever facts and relationships have as yet been observed with regard to each. Granted the working hypothesis of continuity, and the observation of the facts, the rest is a matter of rhetoric only.
Another explanation which is required is that the continuum” of sensory qualities is to be thought of as incomplete if it is actually occurring qualities which are in question. Complete continuity is probably never to be found except in the realm of pure possibility. In other words, there are certainly “holes” in the “solid” which might be formed of actually occurring qualities, but these holes represent qualities which in some possible arrangement of nature might at some time have occurred or may at some time yet occur. The empirical relevance of the conception of continuity in spite of holes lies not ‘only in its enlightening us with regard to what may exist even though as yet unobserved by us, but also in the fact that measurement of degrees of difference can take place as it were over the holes. Thus I can find red to be more like certain trumpet notes than certain violin notes without experiencing intermediaries connecting red with the former or the latter notes.
Note
1. “Between sensory impressions of diverse kinds occur two distinct degrees of difference; first, a more fundamental one between impressions which belong to different senses, such as blue, sweet, warm, high-pitched; this difference I call one in the modality of the sensation. It is so profound that it excludes every transition from one to another, every relationship of greater or less resemblance. Whether, for example, sweet is more like blue or red, can simply not be asked. The second, less fundamental kind of difference, is that between sensations of the same sense . . . . [in regard to this difference]. transition and comparison are possible” (Helmholtz, Handbuch der physiologischen Optik [2d ed., 1896] [, p. 584). The passage—which states with admirable precision, though without mention of any evidence, the doctrine I wish to call in question—is omitted but not corrected in later editions, including the English translation. The idea continues, however, to dominate the textbooks, still without critical discussion of the evidence upon which, one would suppose, it is believed to rest.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, pp. 5-10.