Preface to Reality as Social Process
Charles Hartshorne
Although there has been a lapse of fifteen years between the writing of the earliest and the latest of these essays, they all seem rather shockingly consistent one with another. A man ought to learn some of the errors of his ways between the years thirty-seven and fifty-two of his existence. Or at least, he ought to shift some of his obsessions. But in this instance, it seems that much the same ideas recur with the difference of considerable advances (as I hope) in sharpness of definition and cogency of argument.
The main thesis, that reality is social process, is set forth in the first chapter. From the standpoint of method, a main import of all the essays is that we need to practice what might be called three-cornered thinking. Nearly all the questions that are important for our time are begged or confused by such crude or equivocal alternatives as—fascism versus communism (or even, capitalism versus socialism), naturalism versus supernaturalism, idealism versus realism. If we have made basic advances in intellectual method, and I think we have, in the last century or so, this should affect not merely our answers but our questions, to such an extent that the old dichotomies should be viewed with suspicion.
The content of “nature,” for instance, is not so obvious that the meaning of a contrasting term, “supernature,” poses only the problem of acceptance or rejection. Again, that many meanings of “God” are intellectually untenable does not prove that all conceptions of a supreme reality worthy of worship must be so. It is limiting to look backward to the old fights with the hope of discerning the truth as a pure monopoly of one contender or the other. It is safer to employ what has been well termed the “double rejection,” by which we are set free to look forward to the new alternatives that our resources, the accumulation of the ages, open to us.
It should be our daring aspiration to rise above both sides of the old sterile disputes. What Feuerbach or Hume were fighting, we too may well find unacceptable, but such men failed to establish any logically coercive issue of the form: “agree with me or with my opponents.” There are ideas scarcely dreamt of by either party. And if for Feuerbach and Hume we substitute Kant, Dewey, Russell, Morris Cohen, or Carnap, the principle still holds: there are religious doctrines that these men have neither accepted nor rejected consciously, because they have not been clearly aware of them. Philosophical issues cannot ultimately, I maintain, go thus by default.
Sooner or later men will want to know what it is they accept, and what, in doing so, they reject, and why. It is my belief that our age has the privilege of producing a neglected alternative both to the old speculative theology or metaphysics, and to the mere rejection of all metaphysics and theology, an alternative as significantly new as relativity physics or quantum mechanics, yet attractive not simply in that it is new, but because it renders substantial justice to both parties in many an old battle. In other words, there is a novel “higher synthesis” which offers promise of being not merely one more doctrine to fight over, but, to some extent at least, a transcending of the causes of conflict. Many men have been creating this synthesis, and most of all, the late A. N. Whitehead. My own lesser degree of inventiveness is for others to assess, if they care to.
It may interest the reader, and also express my obligations to those from whom I have learned, if I indicate some of the steps by which I came to the type of philosophy embodied in this volume. Two of the basic ideas—that God is temporal as well as eternal, and that all reality is “psychic,” or composed of some sort of feeling, volition, and the like—did not come to me originally from Whitehead. For the first idea, concerning God, I am indebted to my teacher, Professor Hocking, whose defense of the eternal-temporal view I found convincing; the second, and in a vague way the first idea as well, were beliefs arrived at largely prior to my acquaintance with academic philosophy, on the basis of reasoning from experience—stimulated, as it happened, by H. G. Wells, who at that time was passing through his temporary theistic phase. It seemed to me (then serving as orderly in an army hospital) that the facts of sympathy and of common aims (admitting the antipathies and conflicts then dramatized by the first World War) between men, and to some extent between sentient beings generally, were best explained by the notion that all wills somehow express and tend to fulfill one Will, all lives one Life.
For a time, I thought that inorganic nature must (as Wells insisted) be something external to this supreme life or will; but I soon felt compelled to renounce such a dualism, for the single, and to me still conclusive, reason—which some philosophers, in particular Croce and Whitehead, have stressed, but which I did not consciously derive from any philosopher—that one may directly observe an esthetic unity of feeling between the self, and nature as immediately given, a unity which controverts the theory of a mind-matter duality. (Wordsworth’s poetry—in a measure all poetry—seeks to express this insight). Now if the physical as given is essentially feeling, then, since thought can only expand, generalize, extrapolate, and abstract, it follows that thought can arrive at no world other than a world of feelings, with their relations, aspects, varieties, and so forth. This is, in one aspect, the social view of reality.’
In Royce, I found versions of both the foregoing doctrines. But Royce assumed that for the inclusive or divine life even “future” events, or simply all events, are eternally real, and thus (as it seems to me would follow) not ultimately events, or becomings, but rather constituents of timeless being. W. E. Hocking, William James, and R. B. Perry cured me of any tendency to follow Royce on this point—and I think Dewey also would have been convincing here. Study with Husserl and Heidegger re-enforced my belief in the ultimate reality of temporal process. And as to the other conviction, that there is no absolute duality of mind and matter (since both as observed are composed of feeling), I noted that the neo-Kantian school (in Rickert) and Husserl’s phenomenology (in his most famous disciple, Heidegger) had come to see, what Kant and Husserl themselves overlooked, that experience on the first level, which is prior to thought, is feeling in confrontation with feeling, feeling with a social structure, not cognition of bare facts or mere matter (whatever that would be) or mere neutral qualities or forms.
Then came the study of Peirce and Whitehead, begun at the same time and continued ever since. I found Peirce apparently undecided, and certainly unclear, as to the relation of God to time and becoming; but that reality is given and hence can only be thought (other than verbally) as “feelings” (in “reaction” with other feelings and functioning in “representations” or meanings) was emphatically Peirce’s doctrine, so that once more this belief was confirmed. In Whitehead’s Process and Reality, the temporal-eternal nature of deity at last received classic expression, in a philosophy developed in the grand manner. (Only later did I realize that Schelling, in Ages of the World, had come a good way in this direction; while at no time did Hegel’s attempt to fuse eternity and time, the infinite and the finite, seem to me more than a vague or highly ambiguous indication of what needs to be done.
Here the criticisms of C. I. Lewis—in a course on German Idealism— helped to put me on guard.) Peirce and Whitehead, it was pleasant to learn, both taught that the structure of reality is social through and through; but Whitehead had the fuller, sharper conception of this structure, in relation to facts of direct experience and scientific inference. And Whitehead had, what no other man had ever had, as it seems: a complete, all-sided, explicit conception of social process as the concrete ultimate mode of reality, of which mere “being” is always an abstract element, or, in the less abstract cases, a deposit or fixed resultant. Of course, Bergson had this idea also, and others; but they were not able to do justice to the elements of being, stability, and identity, which, though nothing apart from process, are by no means nothing or negligible in process. (On the other hand, it may be that in his theory of “eternal objects,” Whitehead slightly compromises the “principle of process” which he shares with Bergson. In Peirce’s theory that definite abstract forms evolve from a primordial continuum of indefinite potentiality, I have hoped one could see a corrective of Whitehead on this point.)
The pragmatism of Peirce, James, and Dewey has scarcely had a crucial effect upon the writing of these essays (I incline to think that what is valid in pragmatism is largely contained in Whitehead), but at least it has reinforced the antipathy to verbal exaltations of “eternity,” “being,” “absoluteness,” or “perfection,” unrelated to meanings relevant to living—to volition, aspiration, and love. All of these thinkers, with White-head, agree at many points, such as: the partial indeterminacy in process, the relevance of all genuine meanings to action, and the supreme value of what Dewey calls “shared experience”— only that he does not see that this last is a cosmological as well as an ethical principle, or that in some lowly form it is present even in “inorganic” nature. The social view means that sympathy is a universal phenomenon, though it is sometimes very rudimentary, and sometimes qualified strongly by antipathy.
To one philosophic influence nearly all of us have been exposed, especially if, as in my case, we have studied and taught in Europe. Yet there are some things which a student of the philosophers mentioned can not have needed to learn from “Existentialism.” Surely not that man is indeterminate and self-caused (Sartre); for all the philosophers named above have insisted upon this. Dewey going perhaps as far as Sartre in regard to human beings, and Whitehead holding the metaphysical doctrine that every creature is in some degree self-created and a new reality every moment. Indeed, for Whitehead, each experience is a numerically different actuality from its predecessors. Also James, at least, had much of the suspicion of “system” that is found in so-called Existentialists. True, none of the Americans or English had said that the “nothing nullifies,” das Nichts nichtet, and I do not wish to say that this adds “nothing” to our wisdom! There may indeed be some value in the unparalleled frankness with which certain writers insist upon the absolute irrationality of life, headed for death, on the assumption that there is no sort of everlasting life to constitute the permanent resultant of our having lived. But James, Peirce, and Whitehead had pointed out, in their several ways, very incisively that the only conceivable rational meaning is in connection with some everlasting community of life, apart from which our action is only a “passing whiff of insignificance” (Whitehead). Dewey alone has refused to face this issue, save in the vaguest language, and then but rarely.
The priority of “existence” over “essence,” from which the name Existentialism derives, is affirmed by all four thinkers just mentioned. However, the English language has an advantage here (alas not usually exploited by philosophers) over at least the French. In common speech we tend to use “existence” somewhat differently from “actuality” (German Wirklichkeit), in a fashion which suggests that the strict alternative to essence or possibility is not existence but actuality. (To be safe from ambiguity, one must say “Actualism,” not “Existentialism.”) It is indeed true that what is actual cannot be inferred from a logical possibility or fixed nature; actuality is always an accident, logically speaking, a brute fact. But the word “accident” suggests an event, a happening; and we do not say normally that events “exist,” rather we say they occur or are actual. They are Whitehead’s “actual entities.”
In Chapter Fourteen it is shown that this distinction between actuality and existence is not trivial, but is essential to any clarity in metaphysics. For instance, it enables us to reconcile the “necessity” of God’s existence with the contingency of all, even divine, actuality. This is an example of the way old issues are transcended by the new insights now available. It is notable that when Sartre says, through one of his characters, that God, if he existed, would be “in a situation with respect to man,” that is, would be relative to man and dependent for some of his actual qualities upon the accidents of man’s history, the French author is affirming something that numerous modern philosophers and theologians, for example, Whitehead and Berdyaev, emphatically accept and insist upon. (Even “neo-orthodoxy,” in speaking of an “encounter” with God, may be implying the same thing.) Sartre is here expressing a profound theological insight, which suggests that his atheism is primarily a protest against the old absolutistic theology, with its supposition that God in his actuality or total reality is simply independent of and unrelated to man.
It has been encouraging to discover in recent years that not only Schelling, but also (among others): Fechner and the German theologian, Pfleiderer; in France Jules Lequier and Renouvier; and many writers in England and the United States, have had ideas of God more or less similar to that which I defend. Thus it seems that a new “natural theology” is growing up, which is about equally distinct from the old naturalism and the old supernaturalism. It is perhaps as far from Barth’s new version of revealed theology as from the kinds of natural theology which he rejects (the only kind, at any rate, he shows much awareness of). It is considerably closer to the (miscalled?) “neo-orthodoxy” of Tillich and Niebuhr, and not very far from what appear—on the basis of a recent lecture and two brief conversations—to be the present views of Nygren, though if I am not misled in this, it follows that his famous Eros and Agape is in some respects an unfortunate embodiment of his doctrine.
To Berdyaev I am close, except for his reliance upon “mythical” language, and his failure to see that the old rationalism misconceived the God of religion, the God of love and responsiveness and interaction with men—not because, as Berdyaev inclines to think, this rationalism was too insistent upon logical criteria, and too fearful of paradoxes, or apparent contradictions, but for the opposite reason, because its logic was bad, and because it was too tolerant of contradictions. The really insuperable paradoxes, we begin to see, are in the idea of “The Absolute,” not in that of “God.” The common saying, “the God of philosophy is a quite different thing from the God of religion,” is now antiquated, or at least, must be given a partly new meaning; since philosophy, in a long list of its modern and especially recent representatives, has for reasons of its own criteria of intelligibility made the great transition from a conception of God as devoid of relativity and becoming to the conception of Him as in his full actuality the supreme relativity and becoming, the supreme subject of social relationships and interactions—though not, for all that, without an aspect of eternity, necessity, absoluteness and independence.
Is the philosophy of this book Christian? Perhaps the question should be left to the experts on the meaning of that term? Like other words, it can be and is defined variously. I do believe that the new religious philosophy is rather more in the spirit of the Gospels. than was the older type of Supernaturalist Theology, which with many scholars I hold to be an inconsistent compound of Greek-philosophical postulates and biblical religious insights. The new tradition in philosophy eliminates the postulates that created this inconsistency, for it finds them inconsistent in themselves, quite apart from religious values and beliefs. Hence the problem of Christianity is in some degree a fresh problem for philosophy.
However, I have no Christology to offer, beyond the simple suggestion that Jesus appears to be the supreme symbol furnished to us by history of the notion of a God genuinely and literally “sympathetic” (incomparably more literally than any man ever is), receiving into his own experience the sufferings as well as the joys of the world. It might also be well to say that, while I cannot accept Trinitarianism as it stands, I do not think that what was wrong with it is rectified merely by going back to the old way of conceiving God as bare Unity. Rather, in so far as the three Persons implied an inner social life of deity, a believer in the social theory of reality must think there was truth in the idea. (See Chapters Eight and Ten.) But he must also hold (with Berdyaev) that the notion of this divine life as having nothing temporal about it, or as involving no social relativity of God to the world as well as of God to God, tended to spoil the doctrine.
Thus, once more, the old controversies may be now mostly sterile; we have fresh issues, and therefore a chance to find fresh truths. It is not enough now to go back to one’s great grandfather, whoever he may be. The old metaphysicians and dogmatists sought, or claimed to have found, eternal truths, but in this search or claim they seem to have made numerous, and one hopes far from eternal, mistakes! On the other hand, it is interesting that theologians of repute, including at least one noted for his conservative inclinations, have told me that they see no necessary incompatibility between the new religious philosophy and the Christian faith, although they admit that the reading of Augustine, Aquinas, Calvin, Kant, or Schleiermacher would scarcely disclose this philosophy. Perhaps our forefathers were neither so right as the orthodox, nor so wrong as their opponents, usually suppose.
If it be asked what technical “ism” the book professes, I should have to reply that, since the old alternatives are repudiated, only some new term could serve, such as “societism” for the theory that reality is essentially social, or “superrealism or “surrelativism” for the theory that deity, or the categorically supreme individual, is neither absolute nor relative in the old sense, but a synthesis of absolute and relative. Not “absolutism,” but “relativism,” in a new sense, is the last word; precisely because, in this new sense, it can include all the absolutism there seems need to admit or possibility consistently to conceive.
Several of the essays have been more or less extensively altered, sometimes including the tide, from their previously published form. Except for the first two paragraphs, the essay on Whitehead is new. In the rest there are some omissions, partly to reduce duplication of content, and some additions, chiefly to provide continuity from one essay to another. I have ventured accordingly to speak of “chapters,” rather than merely of essays. The arrangement is not chronological, but so far as possible systematic. There is some order and progression of argument through the book. Thus the position is outlined in Chapter One, approached from the standpoint of esthetic phenomena in Chapter Two, and from that of social psychology and biology in Chapter Three. Chapter Four explains and defends the sense in which the doctrine combines “realism” and “idealism.” Chapter Five sets forth the factor of chance (contingency, indeterminacy) posited by the theory, shows how chance inevitably results in an element of tragedy in process in spite of any providence there may be, and how providence must be conceived in this connection; further, how love (as religion told us long ago and psychoanalysis is telling us now) is the supreme motivation, and how it unites with chance, incompatibility, and the resulting mixture of tragedy and joy, to form a realistic design for living. Chapter Six, and in simpler fashion Chapter Nine, present the Superrelativist or Panentheist conception of the absolute and relative aspects of deity. Chapter Seven sums up the social view of reality once more, with special emphasis upon religious implications. Readers primarily concerned with religion, and untrained in philosophical technicalities, might perhaps begin with this chapter, continuing to the end of the book, before reading the chapters in Part One. Chapter Eight applies the doctrine to the question of “Christianity,” with some slight reference to the Ecumenical Movement of rapprochement among the churches. Chapter Ten deals with the relations of Reason, Faith, and Revelation (also discussed in Chapter Seven) , and the next three chapters undertake a brief critique of “humanism” in religion, with Dewey and Russell as case studies. Chapter Fourteen explains why Whitehead’s idea of deity and of immortality is religiously “available” in spite of all that has been said to the contrary.
The principal gap in the argument of the book is that only suggestions or brief outlines of “proofs for the existence of God” will be found within its covers. (See, for example, Chapter Thirteen.) This is because I wish to devote a volume to this topic alone. What is done in the following pages is to show that only one sort of idea of God could possibly denote a reality, and to show how this idea can form the central factor in a general view of existence which seems intelligible and able to inspire living, and which illuminates some of the basic features of life and nature as revealed by modern knowledge.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Reality As Social Process: Studies in Metaphysics and Religion, pp. 17-26.