Preface to Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method
Charles Hartshorne
Philosophy aspires to impersonal truth, but a personal element stubbornly persists. I can most easily suggest what the reader may expect from this book by being somewhat autobiographical. Unlike most philosophical writings of our time, this is an essay in systematic metaphysics. In so far it resembles Paul Weiss’s Modes of Being and John Findlay’s Gifford Lectures. With these writers (and with A. N. Whitehead and Paul Tillich) I share a generous — some would say extravagant —view of the scope of philosophy. Brilliant, humane, and wise as the men just mentioned are, they do not exhaust the speculative possibilities now open to us; nor, I think, do they explore quite the most promising of these.
My philosophy is simpler than Weiss’s, and — if I am not deceived — it has a more lucid and coherent structure, in ways which will be explained later (especially in Chapter VI). However this may be, I salute Weiss for the inclusiveness of his vision of life and the world.
Findlay’s philosophy leans heavily, though cleverly, upon Plotinus, Hegel, and Husserl. I think our English inheritance of critical caution and concern for clarity should play a larger part in his procedure; also that we should learn more from Leibniz, the most lucid metaphysician in the early modern period, as well as from Bergson, Peirce, James, Dewey, and Whitehead, five philosophers of process of great genius and immense knowledge of the intellectual and spiritual resources of this century. I largely share Findlay’s appreciation of Buddhism, though we emphasize different factors in this tradition. I also share with him a conviction that idealism (here taking Ewing’s definition: the belief that reality can be explained in terms of mind) has more to teach us than most contemporaries realize. But I distrust the Hegelian method, and though, like Findlay, I was once Husserl’s (post-doctoral) student (also Heidegger’s), the exposure scarcely ‘took’. I think Leibniz, as modified by Peirce and Whitehead — three mathematician-logician-metaphysicians — can better show us how to explain reality (including ‘matter’) in terms of mind. Though closer than Findlay to the Gospel view of the Eminent or Divine reality, I am farther than he is from conventional beliefs in personal immortality, whether Christian or East Indian. I am happy to agree with him that the eminent reality exists necessarily, beyond the reach of empirical argument pro or con, but necessarily with some contingent features or other.
From Stephen Pepper, another writer of comprehensive interests, I differ partly in seeing logical structure, rather than favorite metaphor, as the basic difference between systems, partly in not sharing Pepper’s anti-theistic bias, and partly in that, whereas Pepper regards his entire enterprise as empirical, I hold that an empirical world-view is at best either science outrunning its empirical warrant, or a self-critical fusion of a priori first principles and the conclusions of science. Philosophy has two primary responsibilities: to clarify the non-empirical principles and to use them, together with relevant empirical facts, to illuminate value problems of personal and social life. Pepper is helpful on values, especially in aesthetics, but hampered, in my judgment, by his attempt to dispense with the a priori.
In this book, more than in others, I have attempted to find common ground with linguistic analysts, and to meet the demand of our time to use no technical philosophical or theological terms without taking care to explain them in words with standard non-philosophical uses. I have tried hard to say things sufficiently definite so that they could at least be right or wrong, and then if possible to eliminate what is wrong. If I seem not to have learned much from Wittgenstein, Austin, Bouwsma, Wisdom, or Lazerowitz, it is partly because the mistakes they are at pains to correct seldom seem ones committed by the philosophers I take most seriously, and also because except in the case of Wisdom, the questions they discuss are rarely those with which I wish to deal. I wonder, too, if there is no justice with reference to some of the authors mentioned (and others omitted), in the remark of Kreisel, that the accumulation of trifling details is by no means sure to add up to something significant.
In conclusion, though scarcely in method, I have some sympathy with Berdyaev and Teilhard de Chardin, since they show how a positive philosophy of religion can dispense with certain traditional dogmas of Western metaphysics, including the priority of being over becoming, the reduction of creaturely freedom to the mere reiteration of items in the divine fiat to create the world, the denial of chance or randomness in the world, the complete immutability of deity. In such matters I have been encouraged, but probably not otherwise influenced, by these men.
Undoubtedly the closest parallel to, and probably the strongest influence upon, my philosophy is Whitehead’s. However, the doctrine of ‘eternal objects’ has always seemed to me, for reasons explained in Chapter IV, an extravagant kind of Platonism, a needless complication in the philosophy of process. Then, too, I question if God can be a single ‘actual entity’, another doctrine which appears out of place in this philosophy. I am puzzled also by talk of ‘earlier’ and ‘later’ phases in the becoming of entities said to be devoid of actual succession. Finally, I explain — some would say, explain away — Whitehead’s concept (or metaphor) of ‘perishing’ very differently than some leading expositors do.
With these considerable reservations I am not far from Whitehead, particularly in his views of memory, perception, and causality, gummed up in the doctrine of ‘creative synthesis’ or ‘creativity’ as the ‘ultimate’ abstract principle of existence. This can be viewed as a clarification — but a brilliant and momentous one — of Bergson’s notion of experiencing (human and non-human) as at once creative and preservative, and as in its becoming la réalité même. Dewey, except with reference to the lowest levels of nature, had a similar idea, partly derived from the great Frenchman. As a philosopher of process Whitehead was anticipated, particularly in regard to the idea of God, by the Socinian theologians centuries earlier, then by J. Lequier, G. T. Fechner, Varisco, several English theologians, William James, W. P. Montague, Brightman, and my teacher W. E. Hocking. Perhaps none of these except James influenced Whitehead, but some of them blazed a path for me to the process view of deity.
The ‘neoclassical’ metaphysics, ‘surrelativism’, or ‘creationism’ — labels I have used for my kind of philosophy — can be viewed as Peircean, if Peirce’s ‘neo-Pythagorean categories’ are purified of certain ambiguities and applied, as he largely refused to apply them, to God as well as everything else, and if the one-sided emphasis upon continuity (his ‘synechism’), which I think inconsistent or confused, is corrected. From Peirce and James I accept a basic pragmatism (it is also a kind of existentialism) ideas must be expressible in living and behavior or they are merely verbal. Or, as Whitehead put it, ‘Rationalism is the search for the coherence of the presuppositions of civilized
living.’ I agree with James that neither the ‘absolute idealism’ of his day nor any mere materialism can meet this test. However, the same holds of some of James’s own doctrines, though not of his form of indeterminism.
I call my system ‘neo-classical’ because, while it is not an example of what most people mean by ‘the great tradition’, or ‘the perennial philosophy’, it has been thought out in intimate relation to the great metaphysical systems. The ideal, at least, has been to avoid indulgence in mere personal whim or contemporary fashion. The problem is to find or create a view of first principles that is livable and rationally defensible. In arguing with others, the aim is not so much to persuade them to think as one does oneself as to explore with them the possibility of so thinking, in spite of more or less plausible objections. It is a philosopher’s business above all to warn against bad or insufficient arguments or unjustified restrictions upon ways of interpreting the world, so that as people choose their world-views they will be given a chance to know what they are doing, and to have good rather than poor reasons for their decisions. An example of the ‘poor’ reasons is the way many persons have been determinists because they thought ‘science’ required this doctrine, in spite of the contrary testimony of men of great scientific experience and acumen, from Maxwell and Peirce to Heisenberg and Norbert Wiener. Again, how many have been atheists because of arguments which, according to many theologians and philosophers, misconceive the nature of the theistic question! People should not be forced to deny or neglect their own intuitions by clever sophistries, or intellectual fashions resting on no thorough, careful survey of the speculative possibilities and the thereto relevant evidence. This is a vicious narrowing of a valuable form of freedom in an advanced society.
A basic methodological conviction, to which my practice only partly corresponds (I should have learned more from my former colleague Rudolf Carnap, my present colleagues Norman Martin and Paul Lorenzen, or my former student Lucio Chiaraviglio, my friend Richard Martin, or my son-in-law, Nicolas Goodman), a conviction first acquired from two teachers, Lewis and Sheffer, and then strengthened by reading Russell, Peirce, and Whitehead, is that, as May Sinclair put it, ‘logic is the backbone of philosophy’, and also that nothing is quite clear logically unless it can be put mathematically. Ideally at least, a philosopher should be a mathematician and logician as well as metaphysician. Perhaps this could be said of Plato, certainly of Leibniz, Peirce, and Whitehead — scarcely of Descartes or of Kant, certainly not of Hegel, and not, in an emphatic sense, of Husserl or Wittgenstein.
A philosopher, however, should also have a sense for the non-logical side of awareness. Ideally he should have more in common with poets than even Aristotle, Leibniz, Husserl, or Russell have had. Here James and Bergson were great and so was Whitehead — who, however, learned from the other two. It was so long ago that I can barely recall how it was, but I may have learned more metaphysically from Emerson’s Essays (illogical as they are) and Wordsworth’s and Shelley’s metaphysical poetry (from which Whitehead also profited) than by reading and hearing Whitehead. And as a college sophomore I learned from Royce’s great essay on ‘Community’ (in The Problem of Christianity)the most essential metaphysical lesson of all, perhaps, a lesson the Buddhists had learned long before. This was to detect the element of illusion (or, if you prefer, confusion) in the idea of a plurality of selves mutually external to each other. (There are some mutually external experiences — this Royce failed to see clearly — but not selves or persons, unless very short-lived or remote from each other in space.) During the year following this reading of Royce, it became clear to me, and is so to this day, that any form, however subtle, of self-interest theory of motivation is the erroneous erection into a first principle of what is merely one chief expression of the truly first principle — the participation of experiences in other experiences, i.e., ‘sympathy’ or, in terms of its higher and happier forms, ‘love’. Whitehead’s taking ‘society’ as more basic than ‘substance’ was for me the technically sharp version of what I had firmly believed for ten years. Such also, only less clear, was Peirce’s ‘Agapism’.
In the centrality of the social structure of experience, I find the key to cosmology and epistemology, as well as ethics and religion. From an early pious — yet rather liberal — Christian training, my dogmatic slumber in which was rudely and once for all interrupted by Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, the firmest residuum is summed up in the phrase Deus est caritas, together with the two ‘Great Commandments’: total love for God, and love for neighbor comparable to love for self. But at least something like these principles is in certain forms of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Islam, Zoroastrianism, and even in the two-thousand-year-old hymns of Ikhnaton. If there are central intuitive convictions back of my acceptance or rejection of philosophical doctrines, these may be the ones. But I dare to declare that, in the fifty years during which I have been meditating and writing upon metaphysical problems; I have paid careful heed to as many objections and alternative positions as I could find. I have read, and enjoyed reading, agnostics, atheists, positivists, phenomenalists, existentialists, analysts, materialists, phenomenologists. I have had close discussions with philosophers of these persuasions and also with representative philosophers of India and Japan. Similarly, if I reject what I call ‘classical theism’, it is not because of unfamiliarity with the works, arguments, or people favoring this position.
Since technical logic alone cannot establish a metaphysics, intuitions being also needed, and since these, at least as put into words and conceptualized, are not infallible or invariable from person to person, how far philosophers can ever agree is deeply problematical. As Popper says, all we can require is that the thinker hold himself open to and cordially invite criticism, above all by making as clear as possible what it is that he believes. With Popper I agree also that there are legitimate metaphysical questions which observation could not answer. Critical rationalism, not empiricism, is the arbiter here. The prestige of science is misused if it is taken as establishing the universal competence of empirical methods. In this conviction, so far as it goes, Popper, Weiss, Findlay, Whitehead, and I stand not too far from Descartes and Leibniz, though of course we are much more aware of the vast scope of problems that do come under empirical methods, and also far more acutely aware of the difficulty of making our rationalism genuinely critical. I am not sure that Kant is as much help here as Hume, and I find James at least as enlightening as Moore.
As early as 1924 I was wrestling with Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics. Where I can appreciate his insights they usually seem to me as well or better put by Bergson, Peirce, James, Dewey, or others, including the Buddhists.
It may strike some readers that (in Strawson’s terms) I am doing ‘revisionist’ rather than ‘descriptive’ metaphysics. However, they will be right to this extent only: ordinary ways of speaking, for very good reasons, greatly simplify the complexities of life and the universe, with the result that philosophers who are too passive and unsuspecting in the face of these simplifications will not be describing human thought in its full range. Rather, by implication, they will be doing the very thing for which some revisionists are justly blamed, that is, denying as ‘unreal’ some aspects of experience: those which are normally glossed over in our speech because the purposes that make them important are somewhat unusual ones, such as arise in microphysics, cosmology, ethics, aesthetics, or high religion. Thus, as prime example, the idea of substance, or individual thing or person, taken as not further analysable or reducible, does quite well in ordinary practical discourse, but it has broken down in microphysics, and is dispensable in cosmology; moreover, the Buddhists discovered two thousand years ago that it is inadequate in ethics and religion. It has been cogently argued that it has seriously hampered Christian theology. The idea is so central to our one-sided and in so far dangerous western individualism that deep shocks may be needed to teach us what we miss at this point. Alas, the shocks seem only to probable. One hopes, because one must, that the shocks will cure rather than kill.
For me it is virtually self-evident that neither individual nor national self interest can be the principle of action for a truly rational animal. Not even sub-rational animals in fact derive all their other-regarding behavior from self-concern; rather they directly (though naively) seek, now to protect or help themselves, now to protect or help offspring, mates, or fellow group members. The notion that self-preservation is the law of nature is poor biology. Species-preservation is closer to the true law. Animals with power to reflect pervert this power’6iid deceive themselves if they use it to justify altruism by reference to self interest. Before the bar of reason altruism does not need this justification, and cannot without sophistry be given it (in spite of Michael Scriven’s brilliant attempt in Primary Philosophy).
Why is one interested in oneself? Because (a) like other selves one is an interesting, complex, and more or less harmonious or beautiful reality; (b) one is intimately acquainted with this reality; (c) one has power to change, guide, protect, and help it in its successive adventures. (To do this is satisfying in the doing, but this — the only essential — ‘reward’ of virtuous action is in the action, right now, not in the future). One may add (d) that social customs expect and inculcate a measure of self-concern. But all these reasons ‘justify’ being interested in, valuing, wanting to help, various other persons. The degree may differ (often tragically so), not the principle. True, only one’s own bodily injuries are felt as painful; those of others, like their physical pleasures, must be imagined. But the same is true of one’s own future pains and pleasures. Even memories of one’s past sensations are fast fading. It is imagined experiences that. chiefly motivate us, as Santayana knew; and imagination may, yet need not, be preoccupied with one’s own future weal or woe. For metaphysics to canonize the former option is a sad but common misuse of speculative reason. It is the opposite of rationality, and a kind of stupidity, with which we are all more or less afflicted, to be unwilling or unable to find and respond to values and needs in the lives of others. Moreover, the own self is but one, the others are many, and some of them will indefinitely outlive oneself. So collectively they have the stronger rational claim.
The basic motivation, however, is neither the appeal of a self for that same self; nor even the appeal of other selves for the own self. Rather, it is something more general and yet, in its instances, more specific or concrete: the appeal of life for life — thus my past or future life (or self) for my present life or self and also the appeal of your past or future life (or the lives of birds, or the cosmic life) for your or my present life, reality, or self. Apparently it was Buddha who discovered this, centuries before Christ, if I may so speak, rediscovered it.
Although the foregoing half-open secret of motivation has been known to some for close to twenty-five centuries, technical philosophy has mostly made rather a mess of the job of finding metaphysical concepts to express it. Even Royce sadly failed here. Enormous ingenuity has gone and is going into finding some key to the motivation problem other than love, sympathy, social participation, whose subjects are momentary selves, not substances. (The latter are objects, not subjects.) No such key, I hold, has been found, apart from fairy tales of Heaven and Hell, Karma, or of the partly imaginary and partly diseased human being calculating every future advantage for self and permitting or encouraging self to care about others only as a result of such calculations. The prerequisite for clarity in this matter is close attention to the temporal structure of experience. ‘Philosophies of process’ have been paying this attention — since long ago in parts of Asia, chiefly in the last eighty years in the West. To contribute to this inquiry is the principal aim of this work, which is more systematic and comprehensive than my previous books. In some chapters it is not even roughly anticipated by them.
Chapter I tries to put the reader into the intuitive centre of the philosophy with a minimum of technicalities. Chapters II-IV introduce some of the technicalities, Chapter III in a partly historical way. Chapter V outlines the method, Chapter VI summarizes and Chapters VII- XIII explicate the logic of the system. Chapter XIV gives my revision of the theistic proofs. Chapter XV sketches the basic idea of my first book, The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, relating the idea to current preoccupations with language. Chapter XVI gives a theory of aesthetic, ethical, and cognitive good.
Ten chapters — IV-VI, IX-XIII, XV, XVI — have not previously been published.
I am as always indebted to Dorothy Hartshorne, my wife, for her skillful editing. Also to my colleague, I. C. Lieb, for suggesting Chapter IV and for some other helpful pieces of advice.
Source
Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, pp. xiii-xxi.
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