Letter from Charles Hartshorne to David M. Armstrong1
January 14, 1974
Dear Professor Armstrong,
I have been reading two of your books, the one on bodily sensations and A Materialist Theory of Mind. I have been doing this partly for a course I am about to teach and partly because I hope to be in Australia next summer and to speak at the Canberra conference on a subject to which your work is highly relevant. Perhaps I shall be able to see you there, or if not at Sydney. I expect to be some weeks in Australia.
On bodily sensation we have rather strong disagreements and I had mixed feelings about that book. But, though there are plenty of disagreements about topics dealt with in the more recent book, I find myself feeling much more admiration for it. I cannot imagine a better defense of materialism. I am a great admirer of Greek materialism, and of [Friedrich Albert] Lange’s history of materialism and [Kurd] Lasswitz’s Geschichte des Atomismus. I am as much an anti-dualist as you can be. But, of course, one can “reduce” matter to mind as well as mind to matter. I hold that the former reduction is the only one that can leave no residue. True, it is rather an elevation of matter than a reduction. It holds that the zero of mind is nonentity, not matter. But as against dualism the two ways of achieving a single form of actuality have much in common. For instance, just as you can have interaction without dualism so can I. You have two parts or levels of the physical interacting. I have two levels of the psychical (which is also always physical, i.e., spatial).
A fine feature of your book is your sense of the complexity and depth of the problems. The last paragraph of the book is positively splendid in its candor and penetration.2 All the way through that is what I had been thinking, only to find that you were aware of it. My view of course is that a psychical theory of body will do far more to help in the solution of the metaphysical problems than a merely physical theory. Indeed, I think the “merely” is devoid of consistent meaning, and connotes precisely the merely relational concept you admit will not do. I shall have to look up [J. J. C.] Smart on that.
On pain and pleasure I think you are definitely mistaken. We dislike pain and like pleasure because of what they are, and that is, dislike (or suffering) and liking (or enjoyment) on a lower (cellular) level. We participate in suffering or pleasure that is originally not ours but becomes ours immediately afterwards. Altogether you miss the value aspects of experience, and these are pervasive. Or, where you see these aspects you interpret them as solipsistic, nonsocial, whereas with [A. N.] Whitehead and [C. S.] Peirce—also [Henri] Bergson—I think they are always in some way or ways social. Thus, your account of love omits the sympathy which is the basis of everything.
What worlds apart we philosophers can get in some ways. I have learned most from [Gottfried] Leibniz, Peirce, and Whitehead, whereas your account could have been written (save for one sentence or so) had they never existed. Then there are Bergson, [Benedetto] Croce, [John] Dewey, and many others.
I am delighted with your criticisms of [Gilbert] Ryle and of Behaviorism, and many other criticisms of positions we both reject.
A ticklish point between us is your denial that experiences can be spatial and yet not identical with brain or central nervous states or process. I agree that if singular entities have the same spatial location and configuration they are indistinguishable. But this does not prevent them from being both in the same general region. This is a subtle and complicated question, extremely critical for the whole issue, but you dispose of it in a brief passage that is not very convincing, to put it gently. I also see little force if any in your guess as to what physics is “likely” to show concerning the adequacy of inorganic physics to cover organisms. Some excellent physicists ([Eugene] Wigner, e.g.) think otherwise. Still I agree heartily that the problem cannot arise abruptly with man but must be present in mild degree way down the scale of organisms. Again, when you say that neurophysiologists would be surprised if anything like the [John C.] Eccles hypothesis were to turn up, one reply is that the bigger such surprise the greater the discovery. Surprise is to be expected in science. Wigner has given reasons for expecting surprise precisely at this point. He is not alone among physicists in this.
On the other hand, I like very well your rejection of the popular tendency to divide philosophy rigidly and puritanically from science, even though I do believe there are logico-metaphysical questions not empirical in character.
You do not do justice to the “bundle theory,” which need not be dualistic. Properly developed, with adequate recognition of memory and perception as direct intuitions of the immediate past as in Whitehead’s epoch-making concept of prehensions by actual entities of their predecessors in sequences which he calls societies, carefully defined, and societies of societies, the view can I think meet your objections.
Once the internal relations of experiences or actual entities to predecessors are done justice to, the unity of mind through every change can be made intelligible, much more intelligible than the unity of matter through change, where nothing serves as memory and perception (taken as retrospective) to unite each new phase with its predecessors.3 Do you happen to have read [Erwin] Schrödinger’s (or an equivalent) discussion of how quantum physics has led to the abandonment of substance, taken as ultimate and necessary to events or to process? I feel confident that “substance” has nothing to add to the relations we can find in experiences to their predecessors.
Your omission of memory is striking, considering that on the “process” view memory is the key to the coherence of the world, perception being impersonal memory, experience of the impersonal past, as ordinary memory is experience of the personal past. Causality is the same relation read backwards. So, I agree that memory is a subspecies of causality, but perception is the only other subspecies. (The past is either personal or impersonal.) Of course, in all this the terms memory and perception, and other psychological terms, are taken as only incidentally human, or even vertebrate. For science the view amounts to the doctrine that comparative psychology, generalized to cover all behavior down to atoms and particles, eventually embraces physics as covering the most ubiquitous forms of behavior. Moreover, it is all “proper behavior” in your sense, provided one is speaking of true singulars not aggregates (Leibniz’s distinction, without some of the excesses of his monadology). Aggregates, e.g. winds, and even trees (compared to vegetable cells) do not behave in the proper sense. So, they do not have mind.
You do not seem to give a physical account of introspection. What in the brain scans what in the brain in this case? I agree that introspection involves two entities, the scanning and the scanned. If I recall correctly Ryle takes introspection to be retrospection, a form or use of immediate memory. This is the view which I accept. I first met it in [Paul] Natorp I think, but it is also Whitehead’s view. Introspection is experience of prior personal experience. The psychical account has no special difficulty here. I agree that introspection is fallible, if verbalized reports are in question. I do not agree that immediate memory as such, primary memory in Bergson’s and [Edmund] Husserl’s sense, is fallible in any other sense than that the interpretations, verbal or otherwise, may be so. The direct data of memory and perception are simply had and cannot be illusory. And they are all past, and hence immune to alteration or distortion. But in perception the direct data are inner-bodily, and presumably neural.
To what does pain point? To the sufferings of some of our bodily members, presumably cells. Which ones? There your point that location is intentional not sensory applies. But the suffering, the disvalue, is sensory and a given (pace Armstrong).
Enough or too much?
The final paragraph of Armstrong’s A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 366.
We must recognize, however, that even if the doctrine of mind put forward in this book is correct, a physicalist philosophy is not at the end, but rather at the beginning, of its problems. The clearing away of the problem of mind only brings us face to face with the deeper problems connected with matter. Such notions as substance, cause, law, space and time, remain in as much obscurity as ever when we have given an account of the local and temporary phenomenon of mind purely in terms of such concepts. A physicalist theory of mind is a mere prolegomenon to a physicalist metaphysics. Such a metaphysics, like the theory of mind, will no doubt be the joint product of scientific investigation and philosophical reflection.
Notes
1. This letter is on file at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California. I have corrected Hartshorne’s spelling in a couple of places and inserted in brackets the first names of the authors to which he refers. In one case (see note 3) I have corrected the grammar. I do not know whether Armstrong responded to this letter or if the two met in Australia during Hartshorne’s visit.
2. See page 4.
3. Hartshorne wrote: “. . . where nothing serves as memory and perception (taken as retrospective) can serve to unite each new phase with its predecessors.”
— Notes: Donald Wayne Viney