Charles Hartshorne
Some years ago the idea expressed in the title of this book occurred to me, and much of Chapters One, Two, and Four were written then. More recently, when asked by the Lowell Foundation to give three lectures in Cambridge, Mass., I reworked Chapters One and Two and wrote Chapter Three to make a third lecture. Chapter Nine has been published only in a German translation. Chapter Ten was written recently for this book. The remaining four chapters are slightly revised or extended versions of essays published in various journals. Chapter Six was given as a lecture at West Virginia Wesleyan College.
The relation of the first three chapters to the title will be obvious. I leave it to the readers to decide how well the other chapters illustrate the same principle.
Chapter Seven would never have been written if the late Eugene Freeman, then editor of The Monist, had not chosen a similar title for an issue of his journal and asked me to contribute. This is only one of the ways in which I am indebted to this capable former student (one of the first graduate students I had the privilege of teaching).
This book, like my book on Omnipotence, is written for educated people in general, as well as for those trained in philosophy.
Students of Mahayana Buddhism will recognize the phrase ‘middle way’. I have elsewhere explained why I think, with some support from T. I. Stcherbatski, that Buddhists did not quite succeed in their search for a mean between extreme eternalism and extreme temporalism, nor between extremes of monism and pluralism. But the time has gone past when it was altogether sufficient to ignore the efforts of the Orientals to achieve wisdom. Our western individualism, not adequately corrected by collectivism (and, yes, Our materialism in several senses) now endanger all mankind and indeed life on earth. We are not so wise that we cannot learn from the great non-western traditions.
As the reader will discover, I have invented what seems a new way of referring to notes put at the end of the book, using letters for chapters and numbers for order within chapters. Thus ‘A3’ means the third note in Chapter One and C2 means the second note in Chapter Three. The reader has the advantage of a single serial order for the whole book and the writer the advantage of not having to change all later numbers when he changes his mind about notes to add or eliminate. I have often as a reader been bothered by the trouble of locating the notes for a certain chapter each time one looks up a reference. My system solves that reading problem without making much trouble for the writer. A third advantage is it makes it easier to spot the numbers for notes in the text.
Though not the one to judge, I would not be astonished if some readers were to like this book at least as well as any other of my writings. Together with my Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, it deals with my various fundamental beliefs and theories as, in their most general aspects, forming a coherent metaphysics. Like the other book it gives some applications of the ideas to contingent, non-metaphysical topics. There is a vague agreement with Hegel (“The truth is the unity of contraries”), a closer one with Peirce and Whitehead, also with Bergson and, on theological issues, with Faustus Socinus (“the first Unitarian”), G. T. Fechner, Jules Lequier, and B. Varisco—yes and even with Plato as, following Cornford and Levinson, I interpret Plato. Because of these and many other historical reasons I call my form of metaphysics neoclassical. Only in this century could so many fundamental motifs of the great traditions, including Buddhism and some forms of Vedantism, be made into a lucid and consistent whole. If the lucidity and coherence are still not satisfactory, perhaps absolute success in this endeavor is only an ideal for our human mode of knowing, or for what Whitehead calls our “ape-like consciousness.” But perhaps some of my readers can do it better. I have no doubt that some will try. My best wishes to them.
This is my last, or if I am lucky, my next to last philosophical book. In the last, already largely written, I try to make clearer in what sense neoclassical process philosophy is empirical, even though its metaphysical element is not; also in what sense it is in partial agreement with the results of phenomenology, existentialism, linguistic analysis, and hermeneutics in recent forms. Final decisions about this projected work will be made only after it has become clear what the contributions to The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne (in the Library of Living Philosophers) and my replies to these will have left unsaid that I feel needs to be said, or what loose ends need tying tighter, such as the relation of metaphysics to formal logic and natural and social science.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way, pp. ix-xi.