Preface to The Zero Fallacy
Charles Hartshorne
The idea of this book arose, according to my memory, exactly as Dr. Valady says it did. Our luncheon meetings were also his idea, and I recall no hesitation in agreeing. Long ago I learned that friendship is not a matter of being of the same country, or same native language, or same religion. It depends on the kind of family or small group one has grown up in, the particular school one has been taught by, the genes the two persons happen to have come by in the lottery of conception, and finally on the uses the two people and those around them have made of their bits of creative freedom moment by moment. I recall how in India the face and manner of the man chosen to meet us at a hotel in Varanesi told us almost instantaneously that we would be friends—and we were. Similar things happened in Taiwan, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Japan. My wife and I made friends in nearly every country we visited, and they were numerous.
I deeply appreciate the generous effort Dr. Valady has made to produce this introduction to what I call neoclassical metaphysics, and its applications to several kinds of empirical topics. I have no criticism of his introduction or of his many questions in “Points of View: A Brisk Dialogue”; they seem to me invariably pertinent and models of clarity.
One criticism I make of my former self: this is that I now regret having for so long followed the routine practice of using the male gender in referring to deity, also in taking man as the name of the species. I became profeminist more than seven decades ago but began showing this linguistically less than two decades ago. I have tried to purify some of the offending passages.
Chapter 4, and the brief inclusion of section C in chapter 8, are my additions to his choice among my unpublished essays. Otherwise the book is as he planned it. Dr. Valady’s term of editor for himself is modest indeed since without him nothing at all like this book would have existed. Others have understood my thought, but who else would, for so many years, have focused so sharply and adroitly on the task of enabling the philosophically concerned world to understand it by reading this single not very large book? In the history of philosophy I know of no other case of a young trained philosopher (trained in two cultures and expert in another, Sartre and French philosophy) so generously and brilliantly aiding an elderly one. In chapter 1, he formulates seventy some questions or critical comments on my thought, averaging about four lines of his own words per comment, sometimes with briefer quotations from my writings, and leaving me enough space for my seventy replies. Not once did his formulations seem irrelevant, unintelligent, or unfair to me or anyone else. These facts seem to me, after my long experience with the difficulties of communication in philosophy, almost miraculous.
One more comment. The expressions of admiration in his foreword for me as a person and as a philosopher and scholar were new to me; in our oral discussions he never paid compliments. There was no need. The way his face lighted up each time we met, like the Hindu’s smile in Varanesi, was quite enough. There are some people who know who they are and with whom they can be friends.
Charles Hartshorne, The Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Philosophy, pp. x-xi: