Preliminary Survey to The Logic of Perfection
Charles Hartshorne
Philosophy can scarcely refuse to deal with the idea of God. For (in spite of some psychoanalysts) no other idea more obviously transcends the scope of the empirical sciences. Yet “God” properly stands for the object of worship. Can a worshipful deity be the object of rational analysis or demonstration? Must not what we analyze be an it, rather than a thou? We encounter God, it is said, as we do friends and enemies; we do not define or prove Him or them. I believe that this objection rather inconsistently presupposes a rationalistic theory of the nature of deity, a theory which I wish to challenge. This is the theory that God is a single something, an entity so essentially “simple” that there can be no distinction between His reality as a whole and any definable positive characteristic by which we could conceptually identify Him, in contrast to other beings.
My own rationalistic theory implies that while no essence, to be captured in a human concept, could possibly be the entire actual God whom we confront in worship, yet such an essence could very well qualify God and no one else. It would be an it, though God is not. But the Thou could include the it, and indeed the personal includes the impersonal, not vice versa. My friend is not an it, but friendship is, and my friend embodies this it. The God who loves us now is no essence; yet love, and even in a fashion divine love, is an essence. God is infinitely more than divine love, as a definable concept, an abstraction. He is the unimaginable actual love of the unimaginable vastness of actual things; what we call His essence, or His attribute of “perfection,” is the common denominator of God loving this world, or that world, or a third world, and so on, out of the absolute infinity of possible kinds of world and of possible ways in which each kind of world could be divinely loved.
The view that such distinctions cannot be made with respect to deity is itself, I hold, a theory derived from Greek philosophy, rather than from any religious testimony faithfully interpreted. Thus, whether one can distinguish between rationally defining or demonstrating “God” as abstract concept and defining or demonstrating God as unfathomably mysterious reality is itself a question of how one has defined “God.” The rationalistic question is begged by the antirationalistic argument.
One may admit the impenetrable divine mystery but believe also in the unrivalled lucidity of the divine essence as an abstract aspect of the mystery. God may be at once the most baffling and the most intelligible of all realities, depending upon whether we have in mind the concrete or the abstract in His reality. To reject this distinction between abstract and concrete on the ground that it is only human minds who need abstractions, whereas God who knows intuitively is without them, is again a piece of metaphysical theorizing, not a religious insight. God has not “told us” that He in no sense thinks universals, as well as perceives particulars, or that for Him the Hegelian “concrete universal” (as some interpret it), in which all distinctions of abstract and concrete are transcended, is sound doctrine. Nor has He told us that He distinguishes between abstract and concrete only with respect to the world, not with respect to Himself.
That “God” stands for the supreme concrete reality does not prevent the word from standing also for the supreme abstract principle. If the supreme abstract principle were not uniquely divine, then God would either come under no concept and be inconceivable (and the word “God” without meaning) or He would be but another instance of the principle, which would thus in a sense be super-divine. This seems blasphemous.
Men judge a philosophy or a religion partly by its practical applications, its “fruits.” Whatever our religion or philosophy of life, its fruits can hardly be judged adequate unless it can be used to illuminate two momentous practical questions of our time. These are: how can we have liberty with peace, or at least with the avoidance of totally destructive warfare; and how can we bring the human birth rate into reasonable relation to the unprecedentedly low death rate achieved by scientific hygiene? The tendency of human groups to quarrel to the death, the tendency of technological man to destroy the approximate balance found almost everywhere in nature between births and deaths, these are the over-riding dangers. No attitude toward life which fails to help at these points can serve our minimal needs.
The dangers of group quarrelsomeness are generally conceded; the dangers of excess births relative to deaths are widely conceded by thoughtful people. However, there are many who fail to put the proper emphasis upon one or the other set of dangers. And there are some who virtually deny the second set. They speak about increasing production or populating other planets as sufficient solutions. If those who talk in this way would themselves colonize another planet, the prospects on this planet might indeed be improved. It has been calculated that in 11,000 years, at the present rate of increase, the human race would weigh as much as all the known universe.1 In other words, the increase at the present rate will not go on indefinitely. The relevant questions are: how far, if at all, will the rate be reduced by increase in the death rate, and how far by reduction in the birth rate, and what role, if any, will conscious choice play in the affair? Shall we try to reduce births, or try to increase deaths, or simply drift? Of course, we shall increase production, and also do some space-exploring; but, since it is mathematically proved that these alone will not suffice, we must either make plans to reduce the birth-death ratio, or expect that the reduction will be forced upon us, perhaps in some brutal and ugly fashion.
It is similarly evident that group quarrelsomeness, including modes of treating racial traits or religious differences which are bound to generate quarrels, must be reduced — if in no other way, then by the destruction of a species which cannot moderate its internal animosities. But how far shall peace come through destruction and coercion, and how far through reconciliation?
The religious-philosophical question is, How can we so interpret life that we shall be motivated to deal wisely and nobly with these dilemmas? Inherited attitudes in all religions seem insufficient to enlighten us. At least their representatives fail to make the sufficiency manifest. Nor is this surprising, since both problems are somewhat novel. The novelty is due to science and technology. Is it not reasonable to suppose that a closer relationship between science and religion, or reason and faith, is what is required? There are many ways to look at the contrast between modern intellectual methods — as exhibited, say, in empirical science and mathematical logic — and the ancient faiths. No one man can hope to give us the truth here. At best he may furnish helpful suggestions. But clearly we should all search for means to transcend individual and group selfishness and bias. The great religions have professed this aim, but how far have they achieved it? I believe they can achieve it, relative to the needs of our time, only by learning from each other and from science.
In this context, Philosophy is included under science, in the sense of employing the critical method. A philosophy should be open to criticism from every point of view, that of the natural and social sciences, that of the various religions, that of symbolic logic, that of rival philosophies. Existentialism and “linguistic analysis” seem to me lacking here; they have adroit ways of making criticism seem irrelevant, or of failing to assert anything sufficiently definite to make criticism seem worth while, for instance by saying that philosophy is not a doctrine but an activity, or a personal way of realizing the human situation. All these contentions have their point, but they do not exhaust the responsibilities which philosophers, or somebody, must assume if our cultural needs are to be met. Someone must seek for the principle or principles which will enable us to clarify the “meaning of life,” in relation to the new sciences and the old religions. Mere unbelief is scarcely a possible attitude; and mere belief in humanity is either an idolatrous exaltation of man which, in my opinion, unlike belief in the superhuman, is without rational basis, or if it is realistic about man and his cosmic prospects, it fails to furnish even the minimum of religious inspiration and integration of life and thought.2 “When the gods go, the half-gods arrive” is still a true picture of human affairs. However, there are half-gods which many revere in all good faith as God. Theologians have tried hard to distinguish between worship and idolatry. I believe they cannot succeed without the help of philosophy. For, historically, theologians have always been steeped in some philosophy, and they seem always to have read elements of this philosophy into their “revelation” before reading them out again as revealed truths.
For instance, the text translated “I am that I am” is made to support the primacy of being and thus classical metaphysics, although, as scholars tell us, the verb in the Hebrew original may be translated in quite other ways, as meaning “I live (or breathe) as I live, I act as I act, I become what I become, etc.” My good friend Professor Tetsutaro Ariga of Kyoto University has wittily suggested that instead of ontology, what theologians need to cultivate is hayathology or hayathontology, utilizing the Hebrew verb in question.3 Who can doubt that Greek philosophy of being presided over the early interpretations of the text? Again, the Biblical passages affirming the changelessness of Jahweh are shown by their contexts to refer to ethical steadfastness, constancy of purpose; and so far from entailing complete metaphysical immutability, they may more naturally be taken as implying a succession of acts or decisions implementing for diverse occasions a single basic intention. Finally, in its context the injunction to be perfect “as the heavenly father” obviously has nothing to do with immutability but enjoins impartiality as between conflicting claims of ourselves and our neighbors. Yet to this day, when “God” is spoken of, theologians and philosophers, believers or otherwise, are likely to suppose without question that the term means a wholly immutable reality. Is this revelation — or is it prejudice and ignorance? How can we ever deal rationally with the religious question if we proceed in such hit or miss fashion? After two thousand years of ontology, why not experiment a bit with hayathology? Even the “Ontological” argument, when freed of fallacious aspects, turns — as we shall see — into a hayathological one.
Among philosophers of this century who have contributed the most to the central philosophical task indicated above I should include James, Bergson, Peirce, Whitehead, Berdyaev. C. Ehrenfels (in his Cosmogony), S. Alexander, and B. Varisco also deserve mention. Among living thinkers, at least in this country, those with the greatest comprehensiveness and courage are perhaps the two Pauls, Weiss and Tillich. Their example is a stimulus and inspiration. In both, however, there seems to be a certain eclecticism, a hesitation to choose between what I call classical and neoclassical doctrines, with consequent ambiguity or vagueness in the basic concepts. Both rely somewhat heavily upon rhetorical devices where I prefer to strive for (though I may not often attain) the impersonal lucidity of the formal logicians.
Tillich’s doctrines that religious thought must be largely non-literal and that God is Being itself furnishes the sole literal description of God (recently he has appeared almost to exclude even this core of literalness)4 are capable of various interpretations. (This problem is dealt with in Chapter Four.)
Weiss’s complex system puts together four conceptions, Ideality, Actuality, Existence, and God, without telling us, so far as I have made out, which is concrete relative to the others. Apparently all are concrete or all are abstract in the same sense.
I have trouble with the logic of such a contention. Ideals I view as abstract elements in more concrete entities. Even existing individuals are for my neoclassical or neoBuddhistic view abstractions concretized only in actual events or states — the truly concrete units of reality — and God is the universal Individual, who, through His states, with unique effectiveness and adequacy, includes all actuality, hence all entities whatsoever. I admit that there are aspects of this picture which are not -wholly clear to me; but it does have a certain definiteness which I cannot find (perhaps it is mostly my fault) in the thought of these two justly admired contemporaries. However, they are wise, humane, and brilliant writers, and moreover if they had not been there I (and doubtless others) should at times have suffered far more than I have from the sense of being almost alone in the cause of speculative philosophy. One hates to think of what might have happened to this cause without Weiss’s influence, or how little communication there might have been in our time between theology and philosophy without Tillich.
The two men mentioned are not the only encouraging or challenging figures in the almost chaotic variety which is, in a way, the glory of the philosophical scene in this country. Thus the following have conceived the metaphysical task in an imaginative or stimulating way: the late DeWitt H. Parker and W. P. Montague; among the living, F. S. C. Northrop, A. C. Garnett, Milic Capek, Stephen C. Pepper, and Richard McKeon. There are a number of others. None of these seems to me to have seen clearly and in its full sweep the issue between classical and neoclassical metaphysics (Parker and Montague came closer to this than most of the younger men, which is discouraging); at least one, Pepper, has had a bias against theism which I feel has blinded him to the essential metaphysical issue (see Chapter Three); and none of them in my judgment does justice to the relevance of modern exact logic to the metaphysical issues. Or, putting it in another way, there is not enough Leibniz in them.
I agree with Leibniz that metaphysics is essentially a question of the logical structure of concepts, and that the mathematical method is the technical key — one which I may have used far too little, but nevertheless, thanks to Sheffer, Peirce, Whitehead, Scholz, Carnap, Martin, Chiaraviglio, and other friends among the logicians, have always respected. In short, the present writer is more of a rationalist than his contemporaries in speculative philosophy, although even farther than they are from traditional rationalism with respect to the relative roles of being and becoming, or necessity and creative contingency. If this be thought a paradox, since metaphysics seeks necessary truth, the answer is simple: it may be necessary, and I think is necessary, that almost everything (and everything concrete) should be contingent. Contingency itself is a necessary category, and in a sense more fundamental than the category necessity. In a similar way, becoming as a category eternally is; but no category has any reality except in the actual becoming which, taken concretely, is everlasting but not eternal or necessary.
The reader may still be wondering what connection the two practical problems which were mentioned early in this introduction (and to which we shall return in Chapter Thirteen) can have with the fortunes of metaphysics. There are two ways of doing without an explicit and sound metaphysics: to content oneself with a merely implicit metaphysics, or to adopt an explicit metaphysical system which is unsound (meaning, as we shall see, unclear or inconsistent). In the absence of metaphysics, in some fairly explicit form, men are likely to feel confused as to their basic aims and aspirations. They do not know how to combine the sense of the importance of their actions with the essential facts of life, such as the inevitability of death, the conflict of aims among men, and the partial or complete failure of many of these aims, if not perhaps all of them, when looked at from the widest perspective in space-time. Accordingly, there is a tendency toward dull despair or cynical indifference.
To escape these evils, many turn to one or another of the old religions, or to a new religion or quasi-religion, such as Humanism, or Communism. But there are many religions, new and old, and it less and less suffices merely to have been brought up in some one of them. But the deeper difficulty is that the religions, in their obvious popular forms at least, are infected with ambiguity in their metaphysical implications. For instance, what does the conception of providence, taken seriously, really mean ? Does it mean that nothing can go wrong in the world, that all tragedy and missed opportunity are but apparent? In that case, let us give no thought to the dangers and threatened ills confronting us, for they cannot be real. The conclusion has no clear, consistent meaning, and neither have the premises from which it is “deduced.” But such confusion is not, I believe, altogether harmless, especially today. All life involves choice and avoidance of danger; the advice just derived from one way of trying to construe “providence” cannot, strictly speaking, be followed. What advice then are we to derive from religious faith, advice useful for today’s needs?
We confront, for example, the possibility that all increase in food production and other results of human ingenuity will be absorbed, and perhaps more than absorbed, by increase in population. Some highly trained men have dealt carefully with this matter, and, so far as I have read them, they are nearly unanimous in finding little hope of any very happy solution during the next fifty or one hundred years.5 We seem to face grim tragedy in this regard, even if atomic war be avoided. (Such war might well reduce production as much as population, and so it also provides no solution.) Then there is the difficulty of even imagining a plausible escape from the dilemma: how to preserve liberty without incurring intolerably great danger of destruction of the populations seeking to be free, along with those seeking to restrict their freedom.
It seems, then, that there must be something deeply tragic in the world. The highest species on the planet apparently not only fails to solve its own gravest problems, but in failing to solve them it threatens to wipe out the other forms of terrestrial life also. Indeed, even without atomic warfare, it is hard to see how very much of the non-human life on the planet can survive if the present rate of man’s self-multiplication goes on very long. For this rate would in 1,100 years leave but a yard of standing room per person! And what would then (or long before then) be left for the 9000 species of birds, for example, with their necessary forests, swamps, and savannahs gone into human utilization?
Man is a destructive creature indeed, compared with whom all other animals are gentle and harmless. What in the nature of things made this human destructiveness possible? Is it original sin, bad luck, divine punishment, divine weakness? Or the nonexistence of any divine power? Man is too conscious an animal to be able to deal well with difficulties unless he has some understanding of them.
One form of metaphysics encourages a refusal to take life’s evils and dangers seriously. They are held to belong to mere appearance, or perhaps to a merely provisional existence important only because exit from it will be into heaven or hell, or into the direct grasp of Reality. Or, again they are temporary evils which will somehow disappear under the workings of providence. These attitudes are soothing, but are they sufficient? Are they intellectually clear and responsible? On the other hand, the rejection of all metaphysics may leave us without the courage to face the disturbing situation in which we find ourselves. For how, in a universe as a whole “meaningless” or “valueless” (supposing this itself means anything), can courage have meaning or value, any more than anything else?
Marxian metaphysics seems excessively vague: for (in spite of some helpful suggestions) it leaves the cosmic question of meaning almost as confused as it finds it. The dialectical process of nature produces man, but will presumably also destroy him eventually; and no clear reason is given for supposing that reality as a whole will have gained any increment of value from the episode.
What we need seems to be a combination of two factors: an explanation of the root of tragedy in the world, an explanation which the mere idea of providence seems not to furnish, even with the traditional doctrine of the Fall (for instance, the sufferings of animals are left unexplained); and a ground for hope, love, and faith in the basic goodness of life, in spite of the truth that tragedy is no passing episode but somehow deeply interwoven in the structure of existence. More tersely expressed, we need a clarified cosmic optimism which understands the element of validity in pessimism. It is my belief that neoclassical metaphysics, in which freedom and chance are inseparable from law and design, can best effect this combination. The root of tragedy, as Berdyaev has so well insisted, is in free creativity, and if freedom or creativity is reality itself, tragedy is necessarily pervasive. But if Supreme Creativity inspires all lesser creative action, and takes it up into its own imperishable actuality, then the opportunities of existence outweigh its risks, and life is essentially good. In such a doctrine, escapism and despair can alike be overcome. All free creatures are inevitably more or less dangerous to other creatures, and the most free creatures are the most dangerous. Optimistic notions of inevitable, and almost effortless, progress are oblivious to this truth. They have tended to unfit us for our responsibilities. Man needs to know that he is born to freedom, hence to tragedy, but also to opportunity. He could be harmless enough, were he less free. Freedom is our opportunity and our tragic destiny. To face this tragedy courageously we need an adequate vision of the opportunity, as well as of the danger.
Merely positivistic or empirical philosophies try to achieve courage without paying its full price, which is recognition of the ultimate metaphysical principle whereby existence has a beauty somehow triumphant over death and destruction. Man cannot properly live on the merely human plane, for the reason, which Bergson so well pointed out (in his Two Sources of Religion and Morality), that man faces negative aspects of existence which are cosmic and infinite. For example, he knows (as the other animals can scarcely be imagined to do) that when he is dead, he is, as the vulgar saying has it, “all the time dead” — for infinite time, that is. We live in the finite, but we know that for good or ill we tend toward the infinite. This infinite toward which we tend is either good, bad, or indifferent. Whatever it be, it is that which at last essentially qualifies our lives. The whole cannot be for the sake of the part merely, but the part can very well be for the sake of the whole. The concrete whole we are unable to know, but metaphysics can give us its most abstract principle, and with that, together with fragments of the whole which we get from science and personal experiences, we can be content. Not with- less! That metaphysicians sometimes claim, and even more often are accused of claiming, without benefit of the special sciences, to give us concrete or particular features of the whole merely shows how prone men are to err.
There is another way (also pointed out by Bergson) in which we can see the need for metaphysics. Man’s power of reflection, which is the essence of his excess of freedom over that of the other animals, easily leads him into anti-social behavior. For whereas instinct can ensure that an animal will give heed to the needs of its young, or to the dangers confronting other members of the group, the clever human individual may all too easily ask himself, “Why should I make sacrifices or run risks for others”? Our entire Western tradition is shot through with crude or subtle self-interest doctrines, derived from philosophies of being, and our whole future is now endangered by the practical consequences springing partly from these doctrines.
It is notable how little communist propaganda addresses itself to individual self-interest. It appeals to groups, not to individuals as such. Indeed Marx sharply rejected sell-interest as the basis of action (for example, in his posthumously published and as yet untranslated critique of Stirner’s egocentric theory; see part two of the Deutsche Ideologie).6 His objection was that the mere self is an unreal abstraction from the social reality, the group, which is the sole concrete bearer of interests and values. In this communist avoidance of the sell-interest motif, there is a deep source of strength; for men “in their hearts” know that they are members one of another,” and do not live for themselves alone, or even essentially. But is the Marxian remedy for the insufficiency of sell-interest adequate? Does not the group become merely an extended quasi-self, or greater individual, one lacking in the unity of awareness which, after all, the human individual, at least in any given moment, does have? And this greater individual, as such not aware of itself, is by no means all inclusive; it too is but a fragment, not the whole. One group, as against another, can still fall into the fallacy of trying to absolutize the merely relative validity of its aims. The root of this difficulty goes deep, and the whole Western tradition is weak or unclear at this point.
How can I love my neighbor “as myself” if, whereas I am simply identical with myself as one and the same personal “substance” or “being” from birth or death and perhaps beyond, I am simply non-identical with my neighbor, a second being? The confusion is subtly connected with the classical metaphysics of being at the expense of becoming. The world is many beings, I am one, you are another; this is the basic assumption. And God, in this language, is the Supreme Being, or “Being Itself.” But then does He too love Himself by sheer identity and everything else by sheer non-identity? Or is there really but one Being, and are we “unreal”? There is no adequate classical solution. But there is a neoclassical one. According to it, the relation between “me” and “myself” as at another time is in principle, though not generally in degree, the same as that which connects me with my neighbor, or even — subject to suitable qualifications, which also express a principle — with God. In this way we can mitigate the excessive individualism which has tended to weaken our ethics.
From this weakness Buddhism has been largely free. But this advantage has been paid for by a certain negativism, a certain inadequacy, or at least ambiguity, in the Buddhist view of the values of existence. This defect does not derive from the fact that Buddhism is a philosophy of becoming and events, rather than of being and substances. It is connected instead with a certain radical pluralism in the Buddhist conception of event. Some Buddhists tried to defend a doctrine of the present reality of the past, but they failed to carry full conviction, and the reason may have been that they spoke in the same breath of the reality of past and also of future events.7 This symmetrical way of arguing the case always blurs the issues between classical and neoclassical doctrines. For if all events are real together, then the totality of events simply is, and being not becoming is the inclusive conception. The Buddhists meant to be philosophers of becoming; but they could see no way to do so except by a symmetrical denial of past and future events, leaving only the present event as real. But then all life is vain, for all actual experience is doomed to destruction. So the ethical defect which most Westerners feel in Buddhism is tied in with a metaphysical one, just as the ethical defect which Asiatics often feel in Christianity is tied in with its individualistic philosophy of substance.
Western neoclassical philosophy has produced a synthetic-conservative theory of events in which the “immortality of the past” is provided for, without any relapse from the standpoint of becoming. (I have so far failed to find a clear anticipation of this in Asiatic sources.) Events endure — but in later events, not in any mere being. Fechner, Bergson, and Peirce adumbrate this doctrine; Whitehead is perhaps the first clear expositor of it. It separates entirely the Buddhist insight expressed in the “no-soul, no-substance” standpoint from the negativism of much Buddhism. The resulting philosophy seems essentially Christian and Judaic, at least to the extent of congruence with the two Great Commandments (which Jesus repeated rather than invented). By de-absolutizing self-identity, one opens the way to an ethically valuable de-absolutizing of non-identity of self with others. The only strict concrete identity is seen as belonging to the momentary self, the true unit of personal existence, as Hume and James rediscovered long after the Indians, Chinese, and Japanese. (Alas, the rediscovery included considerable repetition of the radical pluralism which plagued the Buddhists.) Each momentary self is a new actuality, however intimately related to its predecessors. It is self-enjoyed rather than self-interested. All aim beyond the present is interest taken by one momentary self in others. A kind of “altruism” is thus the universal principle, self-interest being but the special case in which the other momentary selves in question form with the present self a certain chain or sequence. But this chain has no absolute claim upon its own members. Only the cosmic Life has absolute claims.
These matters are to be clarified on the metaphysical level, the level not of facts but of principles so general that they are presupposed or expressed even by the bare notion of “fact” itself, any fact no matter what.
We say today that we are defending freedom. But we have inherited a metaphysics of being which cannot coherently construe freedom. As will be argued in Chapter Six, freedom includes creativity, and it is through its aspect of creativity that “becoming” is distinguished from mere “being.” Almost every month, in our philosophical journals there is a new “reconciliation of determinism and freedom.” What is not seen is that determinism is merely one of the corollaries of the denial of the reality of becoming. Things change, oh yes, but there is, in the present or past causal conditions and the laws of change, a complete and unchanging blueprint of all changes. Thus, the entire factuality of the world, its definiteness of character, simply is, in any state no matter how far back or forward in time. This is the Parmenidean paradox, in one of its several forms: being simply is, it does not become. The Stoics worked out such a view long ago. They also, following Aristotle, worked out a version of the currently popular apologetic which attempts to attenuate the idea of freedom, divesting it of the implication of creativity, so that men will think they have nothing to lose by accepting determinism.
According to such apologists, we are free if we are not coerced or constrained, if we do what we want to do. But suppose we want to add to the definiteness of the world, to decide the previously undecided, to settle the unsettled, to close some previously quite open alternative? Ah, then, the determinist tells us, we want too much. We must be content if the concrete acts we perform are those we wish to perform. This is like telling us that we are not in chains in so far as we do not mind or notice the chains. We have all heard of the tyrant who says to his subjects, “Not only will you do what I want you to do, but you will like it.” The subtle tyranny is not coercion. Are the Russian rulers aiming to make us feel coerced into being their puppets? Surely they are cleverer than that: they aim to inspire enthusiasm for puppetry, and we dangerously underestimate them if we do not see how far they succeed.
Augustine’s theory of freedom was that the divine blueprint defines our decisions for us, and the divine power makes us accept our role as though it were our own. (Adam before the Fall was a bit different, but even this distinction is of doubtful consistency in Augustine’s system.) We are free because we do indeed will what the blueprint provides. So we are responsible and may be punished. Leibniz repeats the argument. Such freedom of course has nothing to do with creativity. That is reserved for God alone. He has perfect, absolute creative power; we have not even imperfect, limited creative power, power to add to the definiteness of reality. The theory passes from the supreme case of this power to zero, with nothing between. This scarcely coherent doctrine is a common form of our inherited metaphysics of being. Is it good enough for our present responsibilities?
The connection of determinism with the philosophy of being comes out also in attempts to elucidate freedom as action proceeding from the self. I do what my character determines me to do, so my actions are “self-determined.” But by what self, what character? The actual self alive in the moment of decision and its character? This self came into being with the decision, and was not among its antecedent causal conditions; hence, its self-determination cannot support determinism in the sense of causal predictability. Is the action determined, rather, by the previous self? But this is the paradox that the decision was already made beforehand and only seemed to be awaiting determination. In any case the previous self is not simply identical with the self now acting, taken as given its full concreteness by that act itself; and this concrete self of the moment either does or does not have at least some slight power of decision de novo, some genuine options despite all prior determinations and commitments.
To think of “oneself” as simply a “being,” identical from birth to death, is to accept an abstract common denominator of many concrete subjects — as far apart as an almost mindless infant, a man in deep sleep, coma, or pitiful senility, and a highly conscious adult — in exchange for the living self now acting, a self which in its concrete fullness never existed until this moment. It is not enough for freedom that other persons or circumstances refrain from predetermining my decision; my past selves also may not deny to my present self its power of self-creation, conditioned but not fully determined by all the past. To argue that acts must express character is to forget that character is but the balance of past acts; it presupposes decisions and cannot in principle explain them.
Would we not be in a better position to defend freedom if we were clearer as to what it is? It is curious to see critics of all metaphysical thinking, one after another, appealing to Spinoza as sponsor of the view that freedom sets no limits to causal determinism. Spinoza was one of the most penetrating and honest of the metaphysicians of being. The entire definiteness of the world, he held, is an eternal truth (to see truly is to see “from the standpoint of eternity,” that is, the standpoint of mere being). Philipp Frank, who admirably understands many things I am ashamed not to grasp, solemnly propounds Spinoza’s absurd paradox that if a stone knew it was falling it would claim to do so freely. This assumes what was to be shown, that it makes sense to speak of a conscious action so utterly devoid of moment to moment decision as falling is held to be.8 Consciousness is inseparable from decision, and it must lapse the instant action becomes merely inevitable. So Spinoza was here talking nonsense. In all conscious (if not in all sentient) action there must be details, however trivial, which are decided de novo. This is the view taken by the philosophy of creativity.
The customary examples of predictable, or causally inevitable, yet “free” acts merely show that in a voluntary act there are some uncreative and hence foreseeable aspects (and this no careful thinker has denied); they do not show that such action has no creative aspects.
Russell suggests that indeterminists claim exemption from prediction for themselves though we all are confident that we can foresee some of the actions of others. The indeterminists I have studied are not guilty as charged. Nor in my whole life have I ever been able to foresee accurately and certainly a single slice, however short or simple, of the action of a single person or animal, and the only sense in which it seems to me harder to do something like this for oneself is that the process of prediction or the memory of it might be a disturbing factor.9
In my own most difficult decisions I recall sometimes seeing, long before I had ceased to debate with myself, the probability (and more we cannot have with other persons) of a certain outcome. But the reason for the continuance of the deliberation was not merely that probability is less than certainty, but also that the “outcome” in question was but an abstract aspect common to all reasonably likely outcomes, and what had to be decided were the exact concrete steps through which this abstract feature would be actualized. Always and in every moment something is not yet settled, or awareness must cease altogether. Until determinists show us how their examples refute this contention, they are not offering any very pertinent evidence. That creativity is always conditioned, causally influenced, and hence partially predictable, no sane person has ever denied (unless with respect to God, and not necessarily wisely even then). But the predictable aspects are precisely the uncreative aspects. One can predict that the poet will be poetic, and in a certain general style, for this has become his “character” and needs no further creation, but one cannot predict the poem. Think of a prosaic psychological predicter setting out to compose a poem beforehand from his knowledge of the poet’s past and the causal laws of poetic composition, thus rendering poetic ability superfluous!
The usual reference to the complexity of the conditions in such cases does not, I think, dispose of the absurdity in the very idea of predicting what, according to the neoclassical view, has to be creatively determined before it can be definite at all. The complexity merely shows that the claim “in principle to predict all” is idle even apart from any truth in the idea of creativity. The determinists’ claim thus amounts to positing an absolute where only something relative has practical utility, and in addition, if we must raise ultimate theoretical issues, it is the wrong absolute. For it may be argued (See Chapter Six) that being, in the form of fixed law, cannot be absolute, since this would make becoming an illusion; however, being too would then be illusory, because all terms involve contrast, and if there is only being, “being” is meaningless. On the other hand, becoming can be absolute in a certain sense, without making being an illusion. How this may be is one of the semi-open secrets of the new metaphysics.
The basic issue about determinism is this: the world is full of arbitrary matters of fact, arbitrary definiteness; either this definiteness was already given, once and for all, even in the remotest past, or new definiteness is added from time to time (more reasonably, in every instant). In the latter view, we human adults may, in higher degree than most creatures, contribute to the definiteness of the world. It is no mere question of liking our causally-appointed roles — finding our chains agreeable or imperceptible — but of making these roles in some degree. Either we have a hand in the authorship of the play, or we are mere actors, and even less than actors, for these in concrete fact always in some measure, and unpredictably, create the play as enacted. This is the real metaphysical question of freedom.
It is true that we can and should defend political freedom, whatever our metaphysics, and co-operate to this end with others, whatever their philosophies. But if we are philosophers, or interested in philosophy, we may well feel some obligation to try to
understand the metaphysics which takes freedom as first principle of reality. For doing so might help us to have a more intelligent and a stronger faith in our cause, and a firmer grasp even of its practical meaning.
Close to the center of the metaphysical problem is the status to be assigned to theistic proofs, arguments favoring belief in God.
It was maintained by Kant, and has been widely accepted, that the theoretical reasons which have been given for believing in God all depend upon the Ontological Argument (invented by Anselm and used by Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Hegel) and that this argument is a mere sophism. Recently, however, there have been signs that the prolonged “dogmatic slumber” on this topic may be nearly over. In a very able article, J. N. Findlay some years ago contended that Anselm’s procedure did prove something, even though not what he hoped to prove — indeed, rather the contrary, since the famous inference, properly evaluated, turns out to furnish a disproof of theism.10 For, contended Findlay, the only way in which the idea of God could be valid would indeed be in the form of the necessarily existent; in so far, Anselm was right. But we know from modern logic that “necessarily existent” is logically impossible; ergo, the idea of God is not only not shown by the proof to be valid, it is shown to be invalid. No such being as God could exist.
If this position is correct, then Kant’s criticisms and those of Russell and others who, armed with modern logic, have embellished Kant are antiquated. The Argument is no mere sophism — it is a discovery; apparently that of the impossibility of God, surely one of the most momentous discoveries of all. Yet not a single opponent of theism has taken up Findlay’s cue! Everyone continues to reiterate Kant’s contention that the proof leaves the issue where it was before. Rather, it forces us to choose between the view that theism is logically invalid or impossible and the rejection of the doctrine of “modern logic” that necessary existence is an absurdity.
A second sign that Kant failed to dispose of the question is the recent appearance of a notable article by Norman Malcolm which demonstrates (I had already pointed it out repeatedly) that Anselm had two forms of ontological argument, not one, and that the standard criticisms are clearly relevant only to the first of them.11 The second argument Malcolm vigorously and adroitly defends, and his reasoning here is in line with Findlay’s, except that he rejects the contention that necessary existence has been shown to be illogical.
Where these two authors agree with each other and with Anselm (also with Descartes, as Malcolm notes), they are disagreeing with the standard treatment of the Ontological Argument in no fewer than hundreds of books. And they are in partial agreement with what I have been writing on this topic for years.12 How long, one wonders, will this challenge be ignored? Here are three of us who, with otherwise very different philosophical standpoints, declare (in effect) that this matter has up to now been gravely mishandled.
It is true that we disagree in the end as to the conclusion to be drawn. Findlay thinks it should be anti-theistic, Malcolm, theistic, and I think it should be both, depending upon which form of theism is in question. The sense in which logic can show necessary existence to be impossible is relevant (and in my judgment fatal) to one such form, but not to every form. As so often, the disagreement turns at least in part upon an ambiguous concept, in this case the concept of “perfection” which is employed in the argument. There are really two essentially different ideas of perfection, and of its existence; and there is no reason why Findlay should not be right as to the one, and Anselm and Malcolm as to the other. Since neither party seems aware of the ambiguity, this might explain their reaching opposite conclusions, the one more or less unconsciously resolving the ambiguity in one direction, the other in the other. My own position is simply that, with this understanding, both are right. What is needed is to clarify the choice between the two conceptions of divine perfection, which I term the classical and the neoclassical.
The points of agreement among Findlay, Malcolm, Hartshorne, Anselm, and Descartes are these: for an individual to exist contingently is a defect, hence either “perfect individual” exists non-contingently, or it fails to exist; but since where contingent existence is impossible, failure to exist cannot be contingent failure, either perfection exists necessarily or its nonexistence is necessary (“perfect individual” is impossible). Find-lay then argues on logical grounds against necessary existence and infers impossibility; Malcolm argues against impossibility and infers necessary existence. I take both positions, the one with regard to the classical and the other with regard to the neoclassical concepts of perfection and its manner of existing. My contention is further that the classical view not only makes trouble in connection with the ontological argument, but has many other disadvantages, philosophical and religious. It is one of our legacies from Greece (not from Palestine), and like most such legacies, as it stands it is inadequate to our intellectual and spiritual requirements.
Malcolm’s essay was published after Chapter Two, in nearly its present form, was completed. If the reader will consult the section on Anselm in Philosophers Speak of God, he will see that to Malcolm’s two Anselmian or Cartesian Ontological “Arguments,” correspond the “two forms” which I there recognize (pp. 96-97, 99, and 135), and that we agree rather well as to the value of the two, except that Malcolm misses the element of validity in Findlay’s contention that it cannot be possible to infer the concrete from the abstract, from which it follows that unless God is a mere abstraction He must be more than the necessary being demonstrated by the Argument, and must have contingent properties as well as necessary ones. In addition to this implication deriving from the Ontological Argument, we have excellent reasons, both religious and philosophical, for conceiving divine perfection neoclassically as requiring contingent states in God. The future of the argument, and that of metaphysics itself, depends upon the fortunes of the new philosophy of creativity.
Notes
1. See Fred Hoyle, Man and Materialism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957), pp. 135-136.
2.This case is temperately but forcefully argued by A. C. Garnett, in his Religion and the Moral Life (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1955), Chs. 2-4.
3. See Proceedings of the IX Intern. Cong. for the Hist. of Religions (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1960), pp. 223-228. Also “An Inquiry Into the Basic Structure of Christian Thought,” Religious Studies in Japan (Tokyo: Maruzen, 1959), pp. 418-419.
4. Systematic Theology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1957), II 9-10. We are here told that statements like, “God is infinite, or is being itself,” are both symbolic and nonsymbolic, since they mark the boundary between the symbolic and literal. I have dealt, perhaps with insufficient subtlety, with Tillich’s view in “Tillich’s Doctrine of God,” in The Theology of Paul Tillich, edited by C. W. Kegley and R. W. Bretall (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952) pp. 164-197.
5. See, for example, C. G. Darwin, The Problems of World Population (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), and The Next Million Years (New York: Doubleday, 1952-1953); also, Harrison Brown, et al., The Next Hundred Years (New York: Viking Press, 1957).
6. I owe this reference to a student, H. L. Ruf.
7. See Th. Shcherbatskoi (Stcherbatsky), The Central Conception of Buddhism. See also T. R. Murti, The Central Philosophy of Buddhism (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1955), pp. 138-139. Note repeated reference to “relativity or mutual dependence” (pp. 138 f., my italics), indicating the symmetrical interpretation.
8. See Frank’s instructive book, Philosophy of Science: the Link Between Science and Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1957), p. 257. In this book there is much about metaphysics, and it is worth reading on that subject too, but there is not a suspicion of what a metaphysics which has learned to think critically about the traditional bias against creativity would be like, and this in spite of quotations from and appreciative remarks about Whitehead.
9. For an original and ingenious treatment of this topic see D. M. MacKay, “On the Logical Indeterminacy of a Free Choice,” Mind, LXIX (1960), 31-40.1 cannot accept his solution, but it is worth studying.
10. “Can God’s Existence Be Disproved?” Mind, LVII (1948), 176. Reprinted in Anthony Flew and A. Macintyre (eds.), New Essays in Philosophical Theology (London: SCM Press, 1955), pp. 47-56.
11. “Anselm’s Ontological Arguments,” Philos. Review, LXIX (1960), 41-62.
12. See especially Philosophers Speak of God, written and edited by C. Hartshorne and W. L. Reese (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953), pp. 96-98; 103-106; 134; 135; 136-137.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, The Logic of Perfection, pp. 3-27.