By Charles Hartshorne
I. Some Not Wholly Serious Preliminaries
on Modesty and Its Opposite
Before I begin this more or less chronological account of my intellectual coming to be, I wish to confess an apprehension that the reader will find the account self-serving and self-flattering. He might, however, remember that an illustrious board of elder statesmen of the honorable profession of teaching philosophy has declared me an illustrious person. Who am I, a single individual, to disagree with them? Moreover, there has long been a question of whether it is humanly possible to write about one’s own past without a certain prettifying of the events and behaviors described. Perhaps the reader has read the remark of Kenneth Galbraith, after he had given a glowing account of an achievement of his as Ambassador to India: “Modesty is an overrated virtue.” It is also, I add, a virtue it is contradictory to boast of, and I have therefore always been careful not to boast of it (said, I suppose, somewhat boastingly). Certainly, a philosopher should, and I do, try to face reality, and it is my intention to admit some of the less creditable facts and behaviors in my past. “It is not wisdom to be only wise,” wrote Santayana. Whatever this cryptic saying meant, one exegesis might be, “To represent oneself as never having been foolish is to suggest that one is either more or less than a human being, that is, a thinking animal but still an animal, and of a kind that has largely lost the wisdom of instinct tested by countless centuries of natural selection.”
There is another limitation in the effort toward modest self-characterization. “It is more important that a proposition be interesting than that it be true”; for, if it is not interesting, who cares if it is true? Here is a related thought, “It is more important that Einstein’s theory of relativity is beautiful than that it is true,” said by Dirac to an audience of whom I was one. I shall in what follows hope to be interesting, and to achieve some touches of beauty as well as a reasonable amount of truth.
In a lighter vein, I recall three definitely modest autobiographies. Two were by persons who made a living by writing humorously; the titles were, My World and Welcome to It and My Life and Hard Times. The third work was also humorous, but by a well-liked and respected professor of geography, Robert Platt, a teacher, as it happened, of my brother Richard, who rose rapidly to fame as a geographer himself. Platt was also my colleague at the University of Chicago. Retired from that institution, he accepted an invitation to another university. There he was asked to introduce himself to his new academic community by writing an account of his career for the campus newspaper. He was not accustomed to thinking about his life and accomplishments as particularly notable. He knew he was capable and well-thought-of but also that others were more distinguished. So how to present his rather humdrum life history? He decided to have some fun. His entire life he presented as a series of failures. He had tried this—with no great success. He had tried that—with mediocre results. He wrote a book—it was only so-so. He got married—no great success there. The campus paper published it all. Soon thereafter he received a letter from a sympathetic reader of his sad account of his disappointments in life. The letter ended with the suggestion that he try to look more on the bright side of things. “Very well,” he seems to have said to himself, “I see how I can have fun a second time.” So he rewrote his life story, this time presenting his career as a sequence of glorious triumphs, including his marriage. This account, too, was published.
If the professor who could see his role in life in two opposite ways, each equally unreal and absurd, was not modest, who is? He is no longer living, but he was a good friend to many, including Richard and me. In many talks with him I recall only one boastful remark. “I,” he said, “am the only person who understands both Hartshornes,” meaning the geographer and the philosopher. It was true that he read Richard’s writings as they came out and, for a number of years, my books as they came out, and appreciated both. I know of no other person of whom this has been true.
Concerning the length of these recollections, perhaps it will be borne in mind that I did not seek the opportunity to write them. I was required by the editor to furnish an autobiography, “short or long” —but how can one be short on so interesting and complex a subject? Were I a person like Whitehead it would be different. He did not boast of his modesty; but his wife did it for him, and with reason. He was one of the greatest persons I have encountered, and one of the most modest. He carefully destroyed all evidence that might tempt anyone to write about his life; he really thought that whatever was important for posterity in himself was in his writings as already published and he was happy that he had been able to put his intellectual self into permanent form. Peirce was less modest, though also great; yet he did say that since his “brain was small” he was unable “to consider more than one idea at a time”, and that people only become logicians (as he had) because they have trouble thinking well. In retrospect he once described his youthful manner as he entered the London Athenaeum Club, “I am Charles Peirce (etc., etc.), and above all I yield to no one in my ineffable modesty.”
II. CAUSAL EXPLANATION
As I have elsewhere suggested (in an essay called, “How I Got That Way”), to explain a philosopher’s development causally is one thing, to assert or imply that the development was fully determined by its causal conditions is quite another. A cause of an event is, by the least question-begging definition, a necessary condition, a sine qua non, without which the event could not have happened as it did. Even the totality of such conditions, some of us hold, only makes what concretely happens possible, it does not make it necessary. As for what turns the possibility into fully concrete actuality, that is precisely what is meant by freedom or spontaneity in the libertarian sense. Strictly speaking, of concrete actualities there are no temporally antecedent yet “sufficient” conditions. Emergence is involved in all causation. Many quantum physicists admit this, although some do not. Even some classical physicists saw it: Peirce for one; and Maxwell at least strongly hinted at it. That the idea of sufficient conditions has been taken so literally comes from the fact, first sharply pointed to by Whitehead, that the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness” is extremely difficult to avoid. The role of language makes this more or less inevitable.
From William James, first, then, years later, Peirce and Whitehead I derived the conviction that it is not the past that determines the present (at least the present of a human consciousness); rather the present determines itself, using past process as necessary condition. Either present process is its own sufficient condition, given the past, or there is no such thing as sufficient condition for the present process taken in its fully concrete actuality. For various abstract aspects of it, the past may indeed be sufficient condition. And much of the time it is these aspects that we talk about causally. James saw the point in connection with the freedom of human beings. Peirce, and later Whitehead, saw it as a general truth about causation as such and actuality as such, with the human example as a special, intensive case. Atomic freedom is insignificant in comparison with human freedom; but it is not zero freedom. People are far too casual in affirming zero where “very little” is all that the evidence supports. Maxwell, Peirce, and Whitehead have all made this point in this connection. I got it first from Peirce.
A vigorously and complexly thinking animal, thinking not only about things but about thinking itself, lives largely—in its imagination— in a world of more or less abstract universals, the specific or individual instances of which are never deducible from the universals. ‘I must have protein’ does not entail ‘I must have meat’, still less, ‘I must have this meat’. The more abstract our goals, the less can they determine concrete actions or decisions. If ‘motive’ in ‘the strongest motive’ is a universal (and if it can be put into words it is universal), then no concrete act uniquely follows logically. So careless of elementary logical truth is a certain deterministic argument.
I hope to make plausible that what happened before and around my childhood, youth, and early manhood causally conditioned, made possible, my philosophical career, but left it concretely free in specifics and details. Of course, my account of causal conditions will be far from complete; but that is a different point, entirely compatible with the presence of chance or causal indeterminacy as a negative but necessary aspect of significant freedom. The doctrine of compatibilism (freedom with strict causal determinism) is a doctrine of the total insignificance of our freedom, giving human beings no greater scope (because zero in both cases) of creative options than the lowest creatures. Not they nor we make effective decisions, settle what was previously unsettled, thus enriching the definiteness of reality; rather, the omnipotent past, or an omnipotent Something or Someone, makes its and our decisions—unless (Spinoza) there has never been anything to decide, since the necessary, the possible, and the actual are indistinguishable.
For me this issue was settled by James’s “Dilemma of Determinism.” In its cosmic, fully general form, the libertarian view was confirmed and nailed down by Peirce’s “Doctrine of Necessity Examined.” After reading the latter, I had other things to do than to worry about the details of “compatibilist” arguments. Whitehead saw the general point, without help from Peirce but with some from James, and wove it into a much more complete and comprehensive scheme. Obviously, he was working on my problems. I had to’ become (more or less) Whiteheadian, as well as Peircean. I told Whitehead this, whereupon he gave me a gracious bow.
III. THE ANCESTRAL FAMILIES
Charles Hartshorne, the grandfather after whom I was named, designed part of a transcontinental railroad and served terms as president of one railroad and vice-president of another. (The town Hartshorne, Oklahoma, was named after him.) So my father grew up in comfortable circumstances. In his youth the family lived in a large, well-landscaped estate in Merton, a suburb of Philadelphia. There was nothing vulgar, so far as I could or can see, about the paternal aunts (three) or the one uncle, or seven first cousins, of mine. The two grandparents died too early in my life to be recalled later.
The Hartshorne family had been Quakers until Phillips Brooks converted Mrs. Charles Hartshorne to the Episcopal Church. My father had his B.A. and M.A. from Haverford (then definitely Quaker) and a law degree; however—partly because he did not want to be obliged to represent his father’s railroad in law cases, partly because he did want to marry a very pious daughter of a scholarly Episcopal clergyman, and perhaps mostly because he was interested in theology—he decided to become an Episcopal clergyman himself. His youngest sister, my Aunt Amy, became an Episcopalian, and so did his older brother, my Uncle Ned. In contrast the other sisters, Aunts Mary and Nanna, between them married three Ethical Culture Society leaders, Nanna being widowed by the first of her two husbands. One of Uncle Ned’s daughters, cousin Tina (Mrs. Richard Jenny), an admirable little person, good all through, lived as a loyal member of the Society of Friends. I grew up knowing about three forms of Protestantism (or at least of nonfundamentalist forms of the Judaeo-Christian tradition) encountering a fourth, Unitarianism, first from reading Emerson, and then when I went to Harvard as a Junior. No relative was anything like a fundamentalist. One family retainer was an intelligent Roman Catholic, Lillie Zietz, Aunt Amy’s companion.
Mother’s family was less wealthy than Father’s but equally refined and even more religious. They were wholly Episcopalian. Mother’s father, the Rev. James Haughton, author of a book on The Holy Spirit (consisting mostly of quotations), I recall as a gentle, kindly person. His parish was at Bryn Mawr, not far from Merton. Some of the Haughtons of previous generations had been wealthy, although a fortune had been lost through an untrustworthy partner.
Through my relatives alone I could learn nothing about the illiterate or semi-literate portions of the population, nothing about the vulgar rich, about alcoholics, dissolute people, nothing about notably stupid, bad-mannered, or violent people. I am not boasting, just trying to state facts about my sheltered upbringing. The sole hint of scandal about relatives that came my way while I was growing up, or indeed until recently, was that one distant cousin (second or once removed) was of a man who came in shabby clothes to a family reunion because, it was said, he thought he had committed the unforgivable sin—whatever that may be. On the other hand, another distant cousin, Anna C. Hartshorne, was the author of a carefully researched two-volume work, Japan and its People (1902), a founder of Tsuda College for Women (first in, now near, Tokyo), for which she raised money and in which she taught English for several decades. My wife and I visited this college, and learned that one of its principal buildings was named after Anna. We recall her as a delightful and obviously brilliant elderly person.
The two families whose merging brought me into being included, within recent generations, several clergymen, several doctors, one of whom, an amateur poet, was among the first to advocate medical education for women and served as a faculty member at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania. There was a distinguished paleontologist, E. D. Cope, and a shipowner who was also an amateur poet all his life.
Recently, I have been surprised by evidence (perhaps inconclusive) of two not easily defensible actions in my childhood or youth by relatives. One of these actions brought misfortune to the individual himself. In sum, my relatives were not faultless; but, as the world goes, they were remarkably close to that. If not in the best sense sheer aristocrats, they were well in the “upper upper” middle class. On the other hand, my parents were not isolated from the poor, the lower middle class, or the proletariat. My mother treated everyone as a fellow human being. As a clergyman and thoughtful reader of newspapers, my father knew and was concerned about what went on in the world. Across the street from us in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, began a large section of the town where lived, in company houses, poor, presumably ignorant laborers in the steel mill, who had been imported from Central Europe. Father was indignant that they had to be at work twelve hours a day. He knew the rationalizations given by the owners of the mill, one of them prominent in his church. Father’s criticism of Billy Sunday, the evangelist, was, “He preaches against the sins of the poor, not of the rich.”
IV. CHILDHOOD AND EARLY YOUTH
a) My Family and Its Residences
My first twenty years were spent almost entirely in Pennsylvania; that is, in the only one of the thirteen original colonies that was founded essentially by Quakers. Two towns (without Quakers, I think) were the primary environments of my family while I grew up. The smaller town, Kittanning (population 4000) in western Pennsylvania, on the Allegheny River, saw me through infancy (that prepersonal stage of life) and childhood (the time of becoming a person) to the end of my eleventh year in June, 1907. The two-and-one-half times larger Phoenixville, in eastern Pennsylvania on the Skuylkill River, was the scene of my last two years of grade school, after which, aged fourteen, I began spending large parts of each year elsewhere, though still being in the town for some days or weeks each year.
In summers (from 1911 until 1916, when the war began changing things), we all went to a mountain resort called Eaglesmere in the northeastern part of the state. It was ideal for observing Canadian-zone nature, supplementing the different climatic conditions in Phoenixville, and in Lancaster County, where, for the high school years, I went to a private boarding-school called Yeates. This diversity of habitats was one of many pieces of luck (the right word in my philosophy) favoring my eventually becoming a fairly sophisticated field naturalist and almost a zoögeographer.
To keep this account within reasonable limits I shall say little about Kittanning, making only incidental retrospective references to it. This is the more appropriate in that I am trying to explain how my becoming the sort of philosopher that I am was causally possible. For this, my youth is more obviously relevant and more readily cited than my childhood. I remember no childhood anticipations of the philosophical problems that will be the concerns of my readers. My mother thought I philosophized as a child; but I have no recollections that confirm this. I loved nature in a rather uninformed way, listened to Father’s sermons (according to Mother), but tended to forget them later when I was beginning to deal intellectually with religion. I read Kipling’s Jungle Books with fascination, also Long’s nature stories, and Hawthome’s account of Greek mythology, learned about electricity from reading Popular Electricity and playing with electric toys, but recall nothing of any childish philosophical puzzling over these or other experiences.
b) Public and Private Schools: Holidays;
Books and Birds; Becoming a Writer
As the oldest of five boys, with Frances, the one sister, eighteen months older, I enjoyed certain advantages. Three of the other boys were so close to my age (two of them identical twins) that when, in Phoenixville, we formed a baseball team, we needed only five additional boys. The playing field “belonged” to us since it was part of the church property, Father being an Episcopal minister. As oldest Hartshorne boy I naturally became the secretary-treasurer, however we called it. In general, in my late childhood and early teens, I was, without any special effort to be so, the leader of three brothers. (Alfred, the youngest boy of the five of us, tended to be left out and made his own friends.) Father got an admirable man to establish in our area the first (or second?) Boy Scout troop in the country (about 1909). Somehow also, I got hold of a book, a wonderful book, by Horace Kephart, Camping and Woodcraft. So I began to plan camping trips for myself and the twins, James and Henry, (next to me in age). Eventually Richard, the fourth boy, wanted to be included when it came to the longest trip, lasting a week. We fished and carried our tents and food other than fish on our backs. I planned it all. When I decided I wanted a microscope (a rather low power, cheap one) I got the others to contribute to the cost, though I do not recall that they greatly shared my interest in the tiny creatures we were thereby able to observe. So with some other things. The twins and I never quarreled.
Of course, being the oldest of the boys in question is the barest beginning of an explanation of the fact that I (and not the twins) became something of an intellectual leader as an adult. But some of the missing factors, so far as they were environmental (not genes), can be supplied. Father decided to send two of us boys, sister having been already so treated, to a private school for our four precollege years. He passed over the twins since they had done less well in public school than Richard and I. (Alas, they knew why this was done.) So I first, and Richard a year later, went to a remarkably good, small private boarding school in Pennsylvania, called Yeates, where we had small classes, excellent teachers, intelligent individual attention, stimulating rewards for achievement. The more I have read about American high schools and about the “public schools” in England as they used to be, the more I marvel at the luck Richard and I had in being sent to that school. Richard is now a world-famous geographer.
In my first year at Yeates I was, as had not happened before, away from relatives or family attendants (all of them understanding and helpful), or previously known peer friends. I recall no shock from this change; and I did find passable friends quickly among both students and teachers. Still, it put me in a position in which I had to learn to develop even more self-reliance. No longer could I enjoy effortless leadership.
By chance, the first Christmas at home from Yeates with the family for the holiday, I saw, in a store in Philadelphia (an hour by train from Phoenixville) to which I had gone to look for presents for the family, a book that changed my life from then on. It was a pocket bird guide, the first good one— and it was very good—in this country, possibly in the world. This was Chester A. Reed’s Song and Insectivorous Birds East of the Rockies. It looked interesting, and I bought it as a present to myself. It pictured a three-power field glass as available for five dollars postpaid. I sent for that. I was now, as I returned to Yeates, in an ideal position to begin to learn a science, ornithology.
Yeates was an almost tiny but well-equipped establishment, surrounded by farms and wood lots, in a principal migratory bird flyway, on a stream in rich Lancaster County, with a variety of habitats within a short walk in any direction. Also, the school had a rule that nicely fitted the purpose I had acquired from Reed’s book, that of learning the birds of my part of the world. Not all the birds! The book concentrated on birds endowed with good organs for controlling sounds, the group of species called true songbirds or oscines. So I began my birding as a specialist. This too was lucky, for, had I not done so, I could never have achieved very much, since my main vocation lay elsewhere. I could not have been responsible for learning all the species ill-equipped to sing (hawks, owls, ducks, shorebirds, sea-birds, etc., etc.) and have become, as I eventually did, an authority on bird song.
The school rule referred to was that students achieving fairly high grades were excused from the otherwise required study hour-and-a-quarter following breakfast. This gave me a splendid time for birding. Nor was this all. The season was midwinter, the ideal time for learning to know the year-round birds and the winter visitors, since the number of species is then small. Learning these was quickly done. Then, as spring migrants began to arrive, I could add them to the list of those already learned. In spring, in startling contrast to autumn, birds are in full mature plumage and are beginning to sing. Identification is therefore at its easiest, and on a good day exciting, since the birds come in waves as the weather favors their flight, and chances of securing food when they descend from the skies of a morning. (They migrate mostly at night.) Altogether, without having ever intended to do so before finding that book, I was almost forced by circumstances to become a field naturalist, a form of empirical scientist. No teacher suggested it. But Reed did it. From this, and also from Kephart’s book on wood-craft, I learned a lesson some seem never to learn: If you want to find out how to do something or understand something, there is probably a book that will give you a good chance of accomplishing this.
Dr. Gardiner, the founder and headmaster of Yeates, strongly favored my new interest and urged me never to lose it. He was an Episcopal clergyman and a Yale athlete; he taught science, including the theory of evolution, and so far as Richard or I can recall he never suggested that it contradicted belief in God. My father had thought this issue through in the 1880s and reached the same conclusion. So had Charles Kingsley, an Anglican clergyman, still earlier. Fundamentalist arguments on this matter—but why bother my readers with this antique controversy?
The school offered a prize for an essay in observation of nature, which I won. There was a school periodical to which I contributed my first bird article, perhaps my first publication; also a short story, and a poem I wrote as class poet in my last year at the school. These three writings are lost, but they were the beginnings of a writing-publishing career that has lasted now for more than seventy years. My first full-time teaching came thirteen years later in Chicago. In my case “publish or perish” has never been relevant. For me it was, as I came to see later, teach or perish. In those years also I wrote an account of a camping trip by four Hartshorne boys for a sporting magazine, which published it. From then on the only years in which I did not publish something were probably the two spent in the army medical corps in WWI and (four years later) two in England and Europe doing postdoctoral study on a fellowship from Harvard. In these four years I was absorbing and digesting new impressions, not giving out results for others. I was reading some, and writing long letters to relatives and a friend or two.
Yeates School gave me: a fine introduction to literature (the English teacher was something of a poet and an interesting man); a basically sound though very elementary introduction to natural science; good training in elementary geometry and algebra, a fine course on the geography of South America, on which I wrote an essay for a prize contest. I won the prize, but for another essay which, to my present astonishment, bore the title, “The Psychology of Advertising”! These writings, too, are lost. Obviously I had a fine momentum going as a writer before even reaching college. I fear the public high school in Phoenixville would not have done this for me. However, the teaching in the grades in Phoenixville for the two years I attended was, so far as I recall, quite acceptable, and I have no complaint whatever about it.
Although at Phoenixville and Eaglesmere I was sometimes the leader of several younger brothers, Yeates brought out the fact that I was not naturally a leader, as the term is usually intended. At Yeates I shone or excelled, but did not lead. Thus, an annual prize for junior football fell to me, not because I was quarterback or captain or made goals but because, as right end I prevented the other side from making one by chasing after their runner (who had broken through our lines) and bringing him down—although he was normally faster than I was, as I knew from playing tag with him.
No dream of becoming president—of anything—came my youthful way. I did hope for some years that I would be a great poet. In the long run five learned societies have elected me president, the largest of these being the Western (now Central) Division of the American Philosophical Association and the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. However, the secretaries of all these societies did the real work (bless them), except in the Metaphysical Society, whose founder, Paul Weiss, is a more managerial person and one to whom I am ever grateful, since his work opened doors for my favorite subject. I merely made the presidential addresses.
At Yeates I told brother Richard, who was my roommate one year, “You will become a college president; I never will.” This prediction has in essence been fulfilled. For example, during WWII Richard was put in charge of the geographical section of the OSS, with seventy salaries under his control. I could scarcely imagine doing such a thing. The urge to tell others what theoretical positions to take in various matters comes naturally to me, but not what practical steps to take. I have even found it difficult to tell a class what books to read, having trouble enough deciding which of many relevant books to read myself.
What I was at Yeates was a “loner,” though without ceasing to be sociable and a teals player. Even at Kittanning, I recall bicycle trips, at least one for miles in the country alone, and one long trip with a single companion. Kit Carson and Daniel Boone, solitary in a wilderness, were childish heroes of mine. Being alone has for me not usually meant being lonely. Partly this was because of a Wordsworthian feeling for nature. When I came to read that poet, I felt I knew what he was talking about. At Yeates this became vividly apparent.
I have elsewhere explained why I think both science and philosophy make Wordsworth easier to take seriously now than when he wrote. Not that he was describing physical nature as it is in itself; rather he was describing nature so far as given to our direct intuitions, apart from pragmatic and presumably scientific abstractions. The “ocean of feelings” that Whitehead ascribes to physical reality is not only thought; so far as our bodies are made of this reality, it is intuited. What is not intuited but only thought is nature as consisting of absolutely insentient stuff or process. No such nature is directly given to us. The individual subjects of the feelings in subanimal and subplant nature are not distinctly intuited, being too minute and rapidly changing. Hence the idea of the simply insentient.
Wordsworth was doing a phenomenology of direct experience far better than Husserl ever did. The famous phenomenologist was too addicted to certain abstractions for that. Wordsworth seems to have influenced Whitehead much as he did me. He saved both of us from materialism and even dualism. Both result from an inadequate phenomenology and a now antiquated physics. At least so I have thought for decades and so Whitehead, in effect, told me, and in his writings implies, that he thought.
At Yeates School three developments were under way in my case. There was the first stage of a long process of becoming a practitioner of an empirical science, ornithology, involving taxonomy in a limited branch, the study of one group of animal forms, plus a specialized aspect of what came later to be called ethology, or the study of animal behavior. The specialization was what Szöke has termed biomusicology, the science of animal music. Then there was making a start in the incomparable career, as it has always been to me, of writer. Finally, there was a first step in the long journey toward maturity in the philosophy of life, or of religion. That all this implied an academic career as teacher of philosophy was a concession to practical requirements and was the last aspect to be fully decided in my mind.
Two events, not yet mentioned, both connected with books that effected life-changes, occurred during the Yeates years. The first was finding, in my father’s library, a copy of Emerson’s Essays. I read it through; it must have had great effect because, some time later, engaged in writing poetry, I happened upon the book again and was surprised to find that the ideas I had thought my own creations were those of Emerson. I had so far internalized the great prose poet! For all that I can ever know, Emerson had as much to do with my present philosophy as any single professional philosopher whom some may regard as my teacher or master. I am not an Emersonian, but I could not have been what I am without him. This is what a cause is, a sine qua non, not an element in an all-determining power making our decisions for us in advance. Until we have something like a consensus on this point, we philosophers are, I think, going to remain as confused as we have lately been. Determinism is as old as philosophy (Democritus). It has never permanently convinced any society in which discussion was at all free and is farther from doing so now than ever. There seems no hope of consensus there.
The third book that changed much for me was Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, a vigorous attack on traditional Christianity. How I got hold of it I do not know; but it broke my dogmatic slumber. Any religious belief I could henceforth accept would have to be a philosophical one, with reasons that I could grasp as convincing. This took several years to find, even in vague outlines. I reached those outlines only after two years at Haverford College and the first of my two years in France in the U.S. Army Medical Corps in WWI.
The summer following graduation from Yeates was the time of my first but not quite last experience in hiring myself out as laborer. Two maternal uncles owned a farm with a hired farmer in charge of the actual fanning. I worked under him, and then, as all the hay was taken care of, went to another farm and then another. My idea was to see what things were like outside the schools and the towns I had previously known. I learned about a number of personality types quite outside my previous experience.
V. HAVERFORD COLLEGE:
THE SEARCH FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION
The choice of college was Father’s. I do not recall being consulted in the matter, nor that I had any wish to the contrary.
At Haverford I listened to many addresses and lectures by Rufus Jones, the most outstanding professional philosopher and theologian that the American Society of Friends has produced. Reputed a mystic and a scholarly student of mysticism, Jones was also a robustly commonsensical, humorous, and knowledgeable disciple of Royce and, through reading, of the Cornell school of idealism. I took a course of his on the history of Christian doctrines in which the assigned reading was Royce’s extraordinary book, The Problem of Christianity. This was the first book by a professional philosopher that I read. The great essay on “Community” definitely settled once and for all in my mind the falsity of the doctrine of enlightened self-interest as the motivation. Without a sense of and sympathy for others there is no personal self. Nothing is more directly natural and rational than interest in others. Eventually, this carried me beyond Royce and anything I recall of Jones to something more and more like the Whiteheadian-Buddhist (and to some extent Peircean) notion of the conscious self as a “personally-ordered society” of momentary actualities, all related to their predecessors in the series by the same principle, though not in the same degree, as relates them to members of some other series. The simplest description of this principle is feeling of feeling, or sympathy. This issue was in the main already settled during my second year at Haverford, after a brief time during which I argued vigorously with my father for the self-interest doctrine. During my first year in the army, when I was twenty or twenty-one years old, the matter grew quite clear. I related my view to a fellow occupant of a tent in which slept those of us who, at the time, were on night-duty. He was a law student, and his comment was, “That’s a perfectly good little doctrine.” I don’t know about the ‘little’, but otherwise I still accept his evaluation.
Another occurrence of importance while at Haverford was coming to read Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, in which he paraphrases, or as DeQuincey put it, “plagiarizes,” Schelling’s philosophy. Otherwise I then knew nothing of German idealism. Eventually, years later, at Harvard (and while studying in Germany) I read much of the literature in English (and some in German) and took a course with C. I. Lewis on the subject. But Coleridge was my introduction to it and presumably had some effect, though my recollections of the book are faint and slight.
Haverford did some other things for me. I heard the great scholar and superb human being F. B. Gummere (whom Harvard tried vainly to attract) in his eloquent lecture course on English literature. My debt to that literature is immense.
I also took a course on composition in which I wrote an essay, “On Taking Things for Granted.” This, too, is lost; but it set forth the risks of lightly assuming as known what is in truth not known. Perhaps I was at that time as close to Sextus Empiricus as I have ever come in my questionings.
At Haverford I encountered a group of sophisticated agnostics or atheists, readers of Nietzsche, and took a look at the latter’s writings. They did not appeal to me, partly, I think, because of the writer’s somewhat repellent personality, as I felt it in reading him. He still does not appeal to me. His crass male chauvinism is unforgivable. I can, however, see now much better than I could then why religion as he found it around him repelled him. And I find sympathetic his scorn of philosophers who fail to see that being is a mere abstraction from becoming. The “eternal recurrence” that so enraptured him seems, on the contrary, a regression into the traditional Greek overestimation of mere being.
I roomed for seven months with William Henry Chamberlin, a senior, two classes ahead of me, a highly intellectual person, without religious beliefs but also without any wish to destroy beliefs of mine. This was my first chance to show that I can associate closely with others without requiring or being required to share their religious ideas. With Phoenixville associates and at Yeates this had scarcely been an issue, except that my parents had become aware of the effects on me of reading Amold’s book and had shown that they would avoid harassing me about the change in my conviction that it had occasioned.
My summer vacation between the first and second years at Haverford was mostly spent at the Plattsburg volunteer military training school for civilians. It was clear that there would be conscription, since we had entered the war; and after a spell with absolute pacifism I had come to view that extreme doctrine (I had read Tolstoi’s defense of it) as not for me the solution of the war-peace problem. The simulated military life interested me, and I wrote long letters about it. But I did not fancy myself as a warrior in the business of killing. So the question of my role in or during the war was moot. The matter was settled and my time at Haverford was somewhat shortened by the following events. Recruiting officers for the U.S. Army Medical Corps came to the institution, with its pacifist tendencies, to ask for volunteers for the status of orderlies, with the rank of privates, to join a group of doctors and nurses to take over from the British a base hospital in France (at Le Tréport, a seaside summer resort). I have in my book of recollections explained why I responded to this appeal. It ended my second year at Haverford in March. Since I had already decided to change to Harvard for my further education, only a few weeks of Haverford were sacrificed by the decision. I have never regretted the time I did spend at Haverford, but I wanted something else from then on.
VI. ARMY LIFE AS EDUCATIVE (1917-1919)
a) I Think about God, Mind, and Matter
The reader may have noticed, in this account, how meeting books has for me rivaled, perhaps surpassed, meeting people as stimulus. The last intellectually important event before my spell in the military was reading (of all things!) H. G. Wells’s novel Mr. Britling Sees it Through. Wells had read William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience and found in James’s idea of a “finite God” what he took, for a few years, as the solution to the theological problem of evil, which, for so many at the time, was dramatically illustrated by WWI. In the novel he expresses this new faith with astonishing and for me then— and indeed even now if I reread it—convincing eloquence. Rarely indeed has any novelist so explicitly and powerfully argued for a definite theological view. Later, as we learn from Wells’s Experiment in Autobiography, he changed his mind and became an agnostic, if not outright atheist. As, during my menial labors in an army hospital, I thought over the notion of a simply finite God, I began to see that, no more than simply asserting, was simply renouncing, God’s infinity the solution to any theological problem.
I will, however, say that, as I found out later, my father had, probably before I was born, himself renounced what had usually been meant by the divine infinity, absoluteness, utter independence, and omnipotence, without substituting for it an equally unqualified divine finitude, relativity, dependence, or “limited” power. Since, in my late childhood and early youth, I heard many sermons by my father, though I recall little of these experiences, it is reasonable to suppose that in my attitude toward the classical problem of evil, which has never been, for me, a major reason for regarding God’s existence as problematic—given a reasonable connotation for ‘God’ —I have almost certainly been profoundly influenced by the fact that my father was no uncritical defender of, rather he vigorously rejected, what I call classical theism. There is ample evidence, some of which I intend to publish, of my father’s thought about this idea of God. It shows the vigor of an informed and highly trained mind (he had a master’s degree, and both a divinity and a law degree). He was also that not very common phenomenon at the time of a pious religious person (with Episcopal and also Quaker background) who in the 1880s accepted Darwinian evolution. For all I know, my philosophy derives as much from him as from Peirce, or Whitehead, by both of whose philosophies I have obviously been strongly influenced.
That James’s finitism does not furnish a credible theology became my conclusion soon after reading Wells, and then James’s Varieties. (I had that book with me in the army, along with a small library of books of philosophical-theological relevance that I managed to smuggle in a second case besides the single one that was our standard equipment. Or so my memory seems to tell me: I do not recall anyone else having two cases in the hut in which I slept during most of those two years.)
What moved me beyond Wells was that he thought of God only as the supermind of humanity, not as the spirit of the cosmos as a whole; and his main reason appeared to be the idea of inanimate nature as mindless— in short a mind-matter dualism. Briefly I accepted this, until the following happening.
One day, looking at a beautiful French landscape, I had a vivid experience. A phrase of Santayana (coming to me second hand, I think) defining beauty as “objectified pleasure” popped into my mind. “No,” I said to myself, and then something like the following: “the pleasure is not first in me as subject of this experience and then projected onto the object as in the experience. It is given as in the object, or at any rate some sort of feeling is so given. Nature comes to us as constituted by feelings, not as constituted by mere lifeless, insentient matter. That is a product of thought, not of perception. Matter as dualists describe it is never a datum, it is a construct. And how can we form a valid concept of something we could never experience and without analogy to what we can experience? So, if God is, as Wells says, the spirit or supermind of humanity, God may be the supermind of inanimate nature (so-called) as well.”
From this time on I never took very seriously the notion of God as radically finite in the sense that Wells derived from James. Learning later that Wells gave up the idea seemed confirmation, so far as it went. Always since then, I have thought of James’s empiricism as a classical example of the utterly inconclusive or inadequate philosophical results to be expected from unqualified empiricism. If there is no a priori metaphysical knowledge, then I think agnosticism is the right conclusion.
No further definite step toward a philosophical theology came to me while in the army. I thought a lot about the problem of Christology (I had Augustine’s Confessions with me) and found that for me the idea that we know God only, or even chiefly by knowing how to think about Jesus failed to speak to my condition. I felt that I had some clues about life and our basic relation to nature and to something superhuman and cosmic. I had had a course on the New Testament by a distinguished scholar, H. J. Cadbury; from none of this however, could I derive an affirmative answer to the question of a radically supernatural status distinguishing Jesus from all the rest of humanity. I responded positively to the two Great Commandments, to the manifestations of love depicted in the accounts of Jesus, and Paul’s great prose poem on the subject; but the essential problem seemed to me the relation of God to nature, and man as included in nature, not the special relation of God to Jesus. I fear that is where I am still. I felt somewhat sad about it. I had been brought up otherwise.
b) My Military Relations with the At Least Equal Sex
The two years in an army hospital were spent with five groups of people: male doctors, all mature persons; male orderlies like myself, mostly in their twenties or not much older; male patients, in age like the orderlies; female nurses doing their jobs, some middle-aged; a few occasional female patients in a separate room, two at a time, either sick nurses or British ambulance drivers. The nurses had the rank of second lieutenant, we orderlies were mostly privates. For two years, then, my female associates were all mature people, trained, disciplined, career women. There were no very young women, no teen-agers! (The one French family I came to know a little included a refined young lady with a child or two, a grandmother, and a husband in the army whom I met on my second and last visit at their house.) Some of the nurses became good friends; and one of these friendships was a more perfect non-erotic relation than I would have believed possible. I feel grateful for this prolonged unique relationship to the opposite sex. In addition to encounters with the galaxy of gifted, intelligent, educated, female relatives in my father’s and mother’s families, my two years of steady experience with professional women—not all with the refinement of my relatives—is a major causal condition making it possible for me, through my entire adult life, to look upon both sexes as human in the full sense.
If there is a difference, I hold that it is women who most completely sum up human potentialities. I agree with Ashley Montagu on this and am prepared to argue the matter. The science of genetics has disproved what Aristotle and Aquinas took as the sign of women’s inferiority: that the “seed” comes only from the father. We now know that genes, the formative factors, come from both parents. Only from women, however, come the supports to the embryo and infant furnished by womb and mammary glands. Nor are these all the uniquely feminine contributions. It is women who have the net addition, the physiological plus. A woman is not an incomplete man—on the contrary.
In the long past, with no science of genetics, poor sanitation, and poor medical knowledge, the burden of bearing multitudes of infants—and in many cases dying during or soon after the end of the childbearing and nursing period—it was almost beyond the capacity of human nature to grasp the truth that women can, in favorable circumstances, do about as well as men in the arts and sciences. No one of us can know exactly how well they might do in a society that had overcome the traditional ignorance and prejudice in these matters. The remaining need for moderate birth rates—to match, in a crowded world, the moderate death rates—would still limit the number of women who enjoyed the favorable circumstances referred to. Plato was wiser than Aristotle here: some women, many women, can and should attain high levels of cultural activity. To deny this is prescientific error, selfish meanness, or the kind of religion that makes obtuseness to new knowledge a divine demand.
VII. HARVARD UNIVERSITY: I BECOME A PHILOSOPHER
a) Interlude in California: My First Harvard Professor
After leaving the army, in the spring of 1919, came a summer in California, partly with Frank Morley, a brilliant and delightful Haverford classmate and his likewise wonderful English parents, via the Canadian Rockies. Included was a bicycle and camping trip by myself in the Sierras. The small number of automobiles made this possible; it would scarcely be so now. I had seen France and England; I thought I should see my own country. I attended a few lectures at the University of California at Berkeley and heard C. I. Lewis on Fichte and Schelling. He charmed me, as he did to the end of my career at Harvard, which began that autumn. (Lewis was not yet a professor at Harvard but was trained there and began his teaching there in my second or senior year. He again gave his course, which I took, on post-Kantian idealism.) A course on typing at Berkeley has been useful ever since. On my bicycle trip I saw a sign about a job in a small lumber mill; feeling that my money might give out otherwise, I took the job for about ten days. This was enough for a task that one had fully learned after a day or two. It was definitely unskilled labor. I also picked prunes for a day. That, too, was unskilled.
b) Harvard Teachers; Doctoral Dissertation
William James, Royce, and Santayana were only memories (or photographs) at Harvard, but R. B. Perry, favorite pupil of James and aggressive critic of idealism, was there and so was W. E. Hocking, a charismatic proponent of idealism. He was a disciple of Royce but was influenced also by James. Flashes of insight, striking epigrams (“pluralism is an unfinished thought,” meaning extreme pluralism—or was it dualism he was thus dismissing?) were his forte, rather than careful, rigorous chains of reasoning. Lewis, student of James and Royce, Kant scholar, exponent of symbolic logic and its first historian, as well as a wise thinker about The Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation, to use the title of his best book (besides his history of symbolic logic) taught me the most. I had five courses with him. H. M. Sheffer, an emotionally troubled person but a brilliant logician, gave courses on his own way of doing logic, one of which I took. I listened to another. I also took his fine course on British Empiricism.
At Harvard I had a minor in English literature with two distinguished teachers, a standard course on zoölogy, and W. E. Hocking’s famous metaphysics course. (I heard a few lectures of his in other courses.) I also had two courses that were (at last!) my introduction to the history of philosophy. I took the course on ancient philosophy and the course on modern philosophy in the same semester. This juxtaposition worked well, so far as I could see. I kept being thrilled to find ideas I had come to by myself in vaguer form being set forth and defended by writers of centuries or more ago; thrilled also by many ideas new to me. James Haughton Woods, named after my maternal grandfather, became a friend and guide in my philosophical studies. Woods was a Sanskrit scholar, a generally learned man (I had a course with him on Greek philosophy), and a wonderful person, as well as the best departmental chairman I have known.
Neither of us had previously known about the other. Woods was the academic statesman who later conceived and executed the brilliant idea of asking Whitehead to teach philosophy, thereby changing the intellectual history of this country and, in time, the world. (But this was in 1924, when I was in Europe.) Woods told me to read F. H. Bradley rather than Bernard Bosanquet —I did, but gave Bosanquet a try, too—and above all to study logic, “The coming thing.” How right he was in all this!
Hocking encouraged me to develop my interest in metaphysical problems; and Lewis warmly praised an essay I wrote on Fichte. Lewis and Perry kept me critical of Hocking’s too easy ways of establishing his beliefs. Lewis had a proof that I still accept for the impossibility that reality could be an absolute, mutually implicative system. Perry went to the opposite extreme of universally external relations. Hocking had learned from James to give up Royce’s unqualified doctrine of internal relations; also to admit a future open even for God and allow for freedom in the libertarian sense. I worked out a doctrine of relations as, in many cases, strictly external for some, though not for all (or both) their terms but genuinely internal for one term. It was not, I think, wholly satisfactory; but it did avoid the two extremes, as found in Russell and Hume on one side and Bradley and Royce, later Blanshard, on the other. Much of this prepared me for Peirce and Whitehead, especially the former, who very obviously and definitely avoided these extremes.
My rejection of a mind-matter dualism, already settled while I was in the army, was encouraged not only by Hocking’s idealism but even more directly by the psychologist, L. T. Troland, with whom I took a course and who was later of central importance for my first book, on sensation. Troland was a convinced psychicalist, influenced by Fechner. On my oral examination he expressed his agreement with me on the point.
Two undergraduate and two graduate years as student at Harvard produced a somewhat definite epistemological and metaphysical scheme in my dissertation on “the unity of all things” (in God). I attempted to prove by argument the positions I affirmed. There is no mention of Whitehead, who was still in London and of whose writings I had read only some parts of The Concept of Nature. This did convince me (if I needed convincing), that reality is essentially becoming or process, not mere being. Also I did write for one class an essay called “The Self Its Own Maker” (before I knew anything of Lequier’s “Thou halt created me creator of myself,” or Whitehead’s “the self-created creature”). My dissertation contained little that is contradictory of Whitehead’s or Peirce’s views; but this came about otherwise than through their influence. The same world, and many of the same influences, worked on me as had worked on Whitehead and Peirce. None of us would have been possible a century earlier. But I am getting ahead of my story.
c) In Europe as Postdoctoral Student; Husserl, Heidegger, et al. (1923-1925)
A Sheldon Fellowship for study abroad came after my Ph.D. degree. I remained abroad for two years and more, mostly in Germany, but with some intensive experience in England, Austria (Moritz Schlick, Heinrich Gomperz), France (Lucien Levy-Bruhl— whom I had heard lecture at Harvard—Edouard Le Roy, Lucien Laberthonniere). I met or at least heard a number of other famous people: S. Alexander, R. G. Collingwood, J. S. Haldane (father of J. B. S. Haldane the great biologist) G. E. Moore, G. F. Stout, Harold H. Joachim, with whom I had a good talk (his book Truth I thought wrong-headed, but I felt that, like Bernard Bosanquet, he was a man of good will), Richard Kroner, Oskar Becker, Julius Ebbinghaus, Max Scheler. In Berlin I heard one lecture each by Max Planck and Adolf Harnack. In Freiburg, I learned about the history of philosophy from Kroner, Ebbinghaus, and Jonas Cohn (“Cohn weiss Alles” was the saying; I remember him as especially good on Plato). Edmund Husserl I saw and heard many times, read several of his early books, especially ldeen. Heidegger I barely met, but heard him lecture many times and read some of his early writings. Neither of the two satisfied me. Husserl seemed naive in his basic program, partly as he did to Heidegger, because of his idea that we can achieve absolute evidence, utter clarity and distinctness, by suspending belief and attending to the given. Heidegger was not naive, but—as it seemed to me—much of the time he was either saying pretentiously what I already knew or was retreating back and back into the philosophic past, as though Aristotle was closer to the truth than the Scholastics, the pre-Socratics than Aristotle, and someone or something, I’m still not sure what, truer than the pre-Socratics– perhaps the poet J. C. F. Hölderlin.
It was only five or more years later, when I read and reviewed Sein and Zeit, that I began to see with some clarity what Heidegger was driving at. Against Husserl he seemed right; being in the world is indeed the basic datum, present even in dreams, as Bergson has shown. Ortega y Gasset had this same agreement with Heidegger. But beyond that, how much did the latter give us that James, Bergson, or various others had not already said in other words? Also I did not especially admire Heidegger’s character, nor can I greatly like a philosopher who offers so nearly nothing in ethics!
In Marburg, whither Heidegger had gone, taking with him most of his students, including me, I heard, besides Heidegger, the neo-Kantian Paul Natorp and Nicolai Hartmann. Natorp was a learned man and I found his Psychologie stimulating. Hartmann, too, was learned and an effective critic of the idealisms that then existed in Germany, but his positive proposals left me somewhat cold. Later, when I had known Whitehead and read his American writings, Hartmann seemed at best a much weakened analogy, in cosmology, to Whitehead, closer to Alexander, and worth attending to only in ethics. His character or personality, too, I disliked. Kroner, Ebbinghaus, Scheler, Cohn, Oskar Becker, Alexander Pfander, and Rickert were my favorite German philosophers. In Austria I respected Schlick, and Heinrich Gomperz (who later taught at the University of Southern California).
One of my objections to Husserl was also that expressed by Gilbert Ryle— his lack of humor. To see no wisdom in the history of philosophy is to be benighted, to see no comic foolishness in it, ditto. In this respect Ebbinghaus was exemplary. He was deeply serious, but also humorous and witty. He had in succession two wonderful wives (the first died of tuberculosis) and he knew it both times. I knew both wives, especially the second, who at this writing may be still alive.
I returned from my student wanderings with some ideas about the direction that phenomenological inquiry should take, in contrast to Husserl, but in partial agreement with Heidegger. My chief quarrel with Husserl (which I expressed to him on one occasion, whereupon he said, “Perhaps you have something,” [Vielleicht haben Sie Etwas]) was over his dualism of sensation and feeling. I do not see Heidegger as endorsing this dualism. For me sensation has always been, since my experience in France in the war years, a special form of feeling or intuitive valuation. The sweetness of fruit and other sugars is an organism’s sense of “good to eat.” Even horses have it. The bitterness or sourness of some substances found in nature is a feeling of “bad to eat,” the saltiness of sea water, a feeling of “bad to drink.” This is a biologically intelligible view of sensation, which is more than can be said of the way many, but far from all, philosophers and psychologists have viewed the matter. I hold that color and sound qualities are, less obviously but still truly, to be similarly interpreted. My first book was on this subject. I still think its basic argument and broad conclusions are sound and unrefuted. Sensory qualities are intrinsically adaptive. Evolution has brought this about.
Most intellectuals are too far from nature and the primitive modes of human and primate existence (in which sense organs and related parts of brains were much as they are now) to easily see the point. Wordsworth poetically expressed the affective content of sense impressions; and Whitehead and I, before we knew each other, got help from Wordsworth, and also Shelley. Berkeley and Goethe both hinted at the basically emotive content of perception. The famous psychologist C. Spearman was well aware of it, as was the American experimentalist F. R. Bichowsky.
I recall no further definite progress in my own philosophical doctrines while a traveling Harvard fellow. I was concentrating somewhat on the sensation problem, of which Husserl’s dualistic account (which he seemed to take for granted while declaring his presuppositionlessness) had reminded me.
d) Harvard Instructor and Research Fellow:
Peirce, Whitehead (1925-1928)
I returned to Harvard with the triple assignment: instructing a course; assisting Whitehead (whom for the first time I would hear lecture) in his metaphysics course by helping him grade papers; and beginning to edit the unpublished as well as the already published philosophical writings of Charles S. Peirce. By sheer luck—for I had not asked for these assignments— I was to be intensively exposed, virtually simultaneously, to the thought of perhaps the two greatest philosophical geniuses who ever worked primarily in this country. There was a price for this. It took me a long time to digest, and then only partially, the technical knowledge and insight of these two thinkers.
The department, as was usual, I think, asked me to give a talk on my European experiences and impressions. This was my first occasion of talking to so large a professional group. I told about Husserl and I little remember what else, except that I did quote Heidegger in a phrase not common with him, I believe, (but then congenial, it seems, to me): the problem of Christianity is to determine “the significance of the Cross.” I was shocked to learn from Perry that my talk had lasted an hour and fifteen minutes. (He tactfully said that he thought about the time only because Professor DeWulf had to catch a plane.) This was the beginning of my acquiring what every professor should have, although I know of at least one who never acquired it, a sense of how long one is taking with a speech. (Two presidents of the Eastern Division gave talks of far more than two hours, one because, knowing what he was doing and being an egotist, he made the most of a captive audience, the other for what reason I cannot imagine. He was supposed to be an experienced and well-intentioned man.)
After my talk, Whitehead, addressing me for perhaps the first time, spoke cordially about what I had said. He expressed surprise concerning Husserl’s stress on essences, the pseudo-Cartesian rationalism I have referred to above. Clearly, he felt as I did that Husserl never understood the fully concrete phenomena. He also complimented me publicly on my remark about German as a language in which it is all too easy to express philosophical ideas (Umwelt and Mitwelt, for example), tending perhaps to give one a specious sense of intellectual command of the truth.
Both Whitehead’s lectures that year in the class in which I was his assistant and Peirce’s papers began to impress me more than any of my teachers so far had done. Besides Whitehead’s class lectures that year, there were those in Boston on Religion in the Making, of which I recall hearing at least one. During my three yeas as a junior member of the Harvard faculty, those were the only lectures by Whitehead that I recall hearing, except one on mathematical logic and one in the elementary history of philosophy in which, one year, I instructed a section. However, I read Religion in the Making, also Symbolism, Its Meaning and Effect (which I reviewed in a student magazine), and Science and the Modern World. Deeply as I was impressed by Whitehead’s personality—the most all-round perfect one that I have met in a person of genius, or as Victor Lowe has said, “the most civilized man” —I am not convinced that my preference on the whole for his thought to that of Peirce is primarily explained by my visual and auditory encounters with hint. As already remarked, my intellectual stimuli have been primarily books.
I had no need to meet Peirce. As with all great writers, what counted most in him was there in his writings. But Peirce came to his ideas thirty or forty years before Whitehead, and in that time great intellectual changes occurred. In addition, Peirce, by a mixture of bad luck, personal mistakes, and mistakes by others, had a difficult time of it, and did not quite “get his act together.” He lacked the steady communication with students and competent colleagues that a scholar needs. Supposing the two comparable in genius, Whitehead had several advantages. That is my explanation for agreeing more with him. Paul Weiss came to the opposite conclusion. But he, too, had never seen Peirce! It remains true that one will have to have Peirce in mind to understand thoroughly my thought or Paul’s.
My career at Harvard was lucky in another respect than that of exposure to Peirce and Whitehead. Paul Weiss did me, also himself to be sure, a great favor by offering to help in the editing of Peirce. He was just the kind of helper that was needed. Neither of us was putting all his eggs in that basket; we both wanted to get through with the job and go on to doing independent work. Both deeply admired Peirce from the first moment, Weiss (I imagine) even before that as student of Morris Cohen in New York. Both viewed our task as an obligation to the profession.
Weiss had more facility at the time in formal logic than I did, but was, as he has said himself, less mature as a philosopher (he was also four years younger). In religious interest and in some other ways I was closer to Peirce than was Weiss. Peirce had an episcopal background, was an experimental psychologist and this country’s first phenomenologist, well before Husserl. But Weiss had traits the job needed. I was hesitating between two procedures, though I preferred one; Weiss who later in his career made numerous bold decisions, urged me to stop debating with myself and do what I wanted to do, which was to adopt the systematic, instead of chronological, procedure. I knew there could be objections either way. But we had to decide and I give Weiss credit for easing the process. Above all he did a great amount of detailed work, not only for the two years or so that we worked together in Cambridge but for some years afterward. The way of numbering smaller portions than chapters was his, adapted from Wittgenstein. It was he who discovered the Sheffer stroke function in three pages of Peirce, written long before Sheffer. It was also Weiss who saw to it that he and I received full credit for our work on the title page of the volumes, even though some graduate students had a hand in it after I left the scene. In every way I can think of, Weiss’s part was beneficial.
My teaching at Harvard was found disappointing, in comparison with the high expectations arising from my work in courses and the dissertation, as well as the written and oral examinations leading up to the Ph.D. degree. There are several reasons for my lack of any great success as a teacher in those years. One was that my first course was badly, uninvitingly entitled (not by me but by someone while I was in Europe). Few, and no excellent, students took it; I did not do teaching as naturally and easily as writing, and I never, in my own eyes, reached the same level of almost steady excellence in it that I (and some others) attribute to myself in the other function. But I did reach a higher level after leaving Harvard.
I never received an offer from Harvard after leaving it in 1928 to go to Chicago. The possibility was discussed in the department; but, as Whitehead, I think, told me, there were “two groups.” On one issue Weiss and I have long agreed: by failing to take either of us the department did not necessarily show its wisdom! In all such matters there is an element of luck. Such things can never be purely rational. Even when one is in a department as decisions are made, it is not always clear why they go as they do. Nor am I entirely sure that in this case luck was bad, so far as I was concerned. And if it was, this is nothing in comparison with the good luck that had already occurred.
Perhaps here is as good a place as any to say something about the fact that, so far, my causal explanations have been environmental rather than genetic. In other words, next to nothing has been said about the unique gene combination (since I have no twin) that must be in me. It is silly to say that this factor amounts to little and environment does everything (apart from the element of freedom I referred to at the outset). It is silly because there is no conceivable way of proving it, and it contradicts in principle, I incline to think, what we do know about the genes and their consequences. The reason for not trying to go further to specify what the innate factor may be in my case is that there is so little secure knowledge by which to relate genes and philosophical differences. If anything transcends easy scientific knowledge, surely this does.
VIII. THEUNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO (1928-1955)
a) The Chicago Pragmatists; A Friend for Life
In this, my first full-time teaching, I found myself in a different climate of opinion. At Harvard only Lewis took John Dewey seriously, not to mention Mead, whose views resembled Dewey’s. But in Chicago it was precisely these two whose views dominated. There was, however, great respect for Peirce and James. I had already heard, and had been impressed by, Dewey when he gave a lecture to a meeting of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association. I may have read something of his writings. I had also seen and heard Mead give brief comments on a talk by Whitehead at the World Congress of philosophers in 1928 at Harvard. The Chicago experience led me to go deeply into the forms that pragmatism took after Peirce and James, especially in Dewey, Mead, Tufts, and their admirers and students, chiefly those in Chicago. If I differ from this “Chicago School,” I know rather well just how and why. Had I remained at Harvard, this might have been much less true, and, I suspect, to my loss.
It is quite possible that nothing occurring in the twenty-seven years I spent at the University of Chicago had more effect on my intellectual development than my engagement and (in my first December in the city) marriage to Dorothy Eleanore Cooper. She did not come to me with an already defined philosophy, except in the sense of having an unorthodox religious perspective (Universalism), of being a theist in a not sharply formulated sense, and of having had some training in Biblical scholarship and in the history of philosophy. She was also a trained botanist and a trained musician (pianist and singer) who was sincerely devoted to the ideals of art and science (especially in the biological form). What more could a philosopher who was also an embryo-ornithologist wish for in an intellectual companion? As for an unintellectual one, I have managed rather well without that!
It was an advantage that my wife, who, for partly accidental reasons, had given up any scientific ambitions she may have had, though not her respect for science, was ambitious not in philosophy but in music, especially opera. This implied no rivalry to my philosophical aims. Rather the contrary! My first book, the gist of which was in my dissertation written ten years before the book, was on sensation interpreted as a form of feeling. And the art to which I chiefly related the idea was music. Bird song, a special case of what I call animal music, fitted into the same picture. My book was in principle credible to Dorothy before it was to anyone else.
Besides all this, I had long ago renounced male chauvinism in principle and expected to do part of the household chores, no matter whom I married. So a wife with ambitions was in order. This is not all. Dorothy had lived through a classic case of a wife (her mother), a career woman in the early days of career women, being married but happy only in her career rather than as wife or even mother. The marriage was stable, but as a relationship endured rather than enjoyed by the two spouses. Dorothy understood this sufficiently to wish either for no marriage or for one very different for both parties than the one she had observed and suffered from since she was old enough to realize what was going on. I had grown up in a far more normally happy marriage than Dorothy had and my experiences in the military corps had prepared me for the male role in such a marriage. I had never expected not to wash dishes as husband, for example. I had done it for months under one or another woman, my military superior, in the army!
One of the advantages of marriage is that one may, with luck, acquire much knowledge of the intimacies of life from in-laws, as well as from other intimates of one’s spouse. I can think of a number of families, Hartshornes, Haughtons, Coopers, their subfamilies, and at least one other, that I believe I know more intimately than I could under a less strongly stable family system.
Our honeymoon was our first experience of sexual union and was, as Dorothy explicitly predicted to me beforehand, about as happy as we can imagine. True we both had read an excellent book on the subject. To make no use of books in such a matter I view as not very intelligent in a society in which writing and printing has such importance in every other aspect of life. Societies without writing work out oral ways of preparing the young. Many in our society lack both methods of being prepared. Margaret Mead had things to say about this. Edith Wharton’s mother flatly refused Edith’s request for such help. Poor genius-endowed Edith; stupid, wicked, or dismally unfortunate mother! Or, read H. G. Wells’s account of his first wife: “she submitted.”
I should say that I had known Dorothy for some months while I was at Harvard and she at Wellesley College and had exchanged a letter or two after illness ended her stay at Wellesley. So our short engagement in Chicago did not mean love “at first sight.” I was not, at that stage in my life, so perceptive as all that. I did know that she was talented and appealing and that we were natural, and at ease with each other. I thought about her as possible life partner, but did not reach a positive decision. We might never have married had Dorothy not seen my name as new instructor at the University of Chicago (from which her father had his Ph.D.). I had not known that she was then living in Chicago with her family. Her mother, told about my presence in the city, said, “Invite him to dine with us.” So chancy are some of the important things in life!
I have not exhausted the reasons why my marriage was favorable to the development of my philosophy and my writing. Dorothy had been a teacher, as both her parents were or had been (her mother, with an M.A. in Classics, only for a short time). Thus she had grown up much closer to academic life than I had. Also she was, at the time, like her mother, a professional editor and proofreader, with a brilliant record as such. Since I was even more naturally a writer than a teacher, an editor and proofreader was something I could use and she volunteered to meet the need. Above all, Dorothy is one of the rare people with so wide a range of knowledge, so nimble an intelligence, and so tactful and generous in friendship as to make her an always interesting partner for an academic person. Not least of all, her chosen friends, men or women, are always good to have as also one’s own.
Robert Frost said, “The woman always loses.” I fear Dorothy lost something by marrying an ambitious professor-writer. She did however enjoy some professional opportunities in music, including opera, and some splendid opportunities in high-class amateur musical comedy, the Faculty Revels in the University of Chicago. She became much more universally known to the academic body than I ever did, and altogether favorably known. So if she lost, it was not everything.
Since neither Dorothy nor I were or are faultless, our marriage has definitely not been trouble-free. But since it was always perfectly obvious that the marriage was fantastically to my advantage in every essential way, I never wavered in my conviction that it could and should be preserved. It has, for more than 60 years. Unless at least one partner has this conviction, the endurance of a union “fill death us do part” is at best problematic. The rewards for sharing happy memories for so many years have to be experienced to be appreciated.
With a different or no marriage who knows what might have happened to my mental growth? I can imagine many ways in which it might have been slowed down—energy lost in emotional stress, various distractions from intellectual and literary ambitions and primary interests—but no probable way in which it could have gone so well as it has. My writing has been criticized by experts for its content, but I think I am correct in saying that no one has objected to its style, to how those contents were expressed. Had I not had a gifted editor reading nearly everything, I might still have escaped severe censure on stylistic matters, but certainly not have won the praise frequently bestowed on the readability of my publications. One distinguished biologist told his secretary to read my Born to Sing “if only for its style.” (He was also supportive about the content.)
This reminds me, had I married a person little interested in nature, or in empirical science, it is very possible that my interest in birds would have led to no such entry into a scientific community as the ornithologists constitute around the world, scores of them well known to me. It was my wife who warmly encouraged me to take advantage of a circular sent to me by the University of Michigan Biological Station about courses in ornithology and other branches of biology given in summer in Northern Michigan. Result, I spent two summers (in my fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth years) surrounded by empirical scientists and no philosophers, participating in a class taught by a noted teacher of ornithology, O. Sewall Pettingill, Jr., author of a number of significant books in the subject and an ideal person from whom to learn the essentials of scientific study of birds.
Thus I moved beyond a mere bird watcher and casual reader of bird books and became a person trying to form and test hypotheses by observed facts. So, when I philosophize, I know vividly what is meant by the behavioristic method, and a number of other aspects of study that transcend mere armchair speculating. At the end of the first summer I finally hit upon my major discovery, a tentative generalization to be tested the following summer. It was called “the monotony threshold,” and was a contingent and empirically testable specialization of my metaphysical belief that the aim of all nature is beauty, aesthetic value. Whitehead said so; I would show how the facts of a branch of psychology or biology, animal behavior and animal mind, illustrated this principle and were illuminated by it. With minor reasonable qualifications it still stands unrefuted, and some experts accept it.
I must add one more contribution made by Dorothy Eleanore Cooper to the mental growth I am trying to explain. J. S. Mill’s protest against “the subjection of women” had something, or much, to do with his experience of a remarkable woman who became his wife. Without help then from Mill I was on his side of this issue long before I knew any woman I wanted to marry. However, the remarkable woman I eventually married certainly reënforced my pro-women’s-rights attitude. In addition, our only offspring—apart from several sad cases of still-birth—was a powerful further reënforcement. Both Dorothy and Emily (now Mrs. Nicolas D. Goodman) have taken careers and motherhood with dedicated seriousness, without allowing either to interfere with the career or happiness of the husband. Emily and Nicolas have Stanford Ph.D.’s, he in mathematics, she in history. As I have tried to be, so my son-in-law, professor in the University of New York at Buffalo, has been cooperative and fair in sharing family chores. He even attended the births, and was as fatherly a father as I can easily imagine, of the two children, a boy and then a girl, now aged twelve and eight. Emily teaches (part-time) courses on medicine in general or psychiatry in particular and has taught the history of feminism. Her Stanford dissertation was in French history, a subject for which the demand has fallen off since WWII. I believe she has found the right specialization. She has her mother’s capacity for research, without Dorothy’s musical gifts but with greater capacity for mathematics. She met her husband in Quine’s logic class at Harvard. Even more easily than her mother she could have been a scientist—or a philosopher, for that matter. (So could her husband.) She easily grasps the gist of my philosophy.
b) Hutchins, Adler, McKeon; A Club of Scientists
In the next academic year after I arrived in Chicago, Robert Maynard Hutchins became president of the University. Through two friends and admirers of his, Mortimer J. Adler and Richard P. McKeon, this soon brought about considerable changes in the way philosophy was taught there. Among the results were the departures of Mead, who had been chairman, Edwin Arthur Burst, and, a year or two afterwards, Everett W. Hall. Hall, then a Cornellian type of idealist, a friend and a helpful critic of a draft of my first book, was a considerable loss. He later gave up his idealism.
Mead, soon after my arrival, lost his wife by death, and a year or so later was terminally ill himself. I heard but one lecture by him. The few personal encounters were unimportant in my case. What was important was the argument between Hutchins, Adler, and McKeon, on the one hand, and the pragmatists and most of the faculty on the other. The dispute seemed at first, far more than it really was, between partisans of neoscholasticism or Thomism and the then dominant form of American philosophy. It led me to think more than I otherwise might have about the issue between medieval theology, represented by Jacques Maritain, friend of Hutchins, who visited in Chicago and was introduced by another friend of Hutchins (not a professional philosopher) as the “greatest living philosopher.” (One wondered how the introducer had ascertained this preëminence.) If I have harped a good deal in my writings on my differences from Aquinas, this controversy surrounding me had something to do with it. I had, however, encountered Etienne Gilson, both in France and at Harvard, had had a course with M. DeWulf on neoscholasticism, and had listened to lectures on the subject while ‘postdoctoring’ in Germany and Austria. So the topic was not new to me but was made to seem relevant by the actual situation.
Burtt’s leaving the department was in one way lucky for me. He was the sole philosopher who had been taken into a scientific group called the X-Club (with wives designated XS). I replaced him. This group became for my intellectual growth a second set of primary colleagues. Through it I met several of the finest (and one of the truly great) scientific minds, Sewall Wright. He is now as I type the still living dean of geneticists with countless honorary degrees and medals to show the extent of his fame. He and his wife became our best friends in the university community. In the club he was the one whose grasp seemed to span all the branches of natural science, and who was also impressive as a scientist well aware of the distinction between scientific results and philosophical beliefs and with definite things to say about both.
In his philosophy, although agnostic about God (because of what seemed to him a conflict between it and relativity physics), Wright shared with me a firm belief in what I call psychicalism. He thought a mind-matter dualism unintelligible, as I have done for nearly seventy years; and if he was not even interested in a monistic materialism, I recall no word from him about it. Only some form of psychicalism was left. He was pleased by my hearty agreement with him in this. He also had ideas about freedom as subtly more than mere voluntariness, mere doing what one wishes. Rather, he thought it had causal significance in the creative sense. He had worked all this out for himself. He learned about panpsychism by reading Karl Pearson’s criticism of it and decided the doctrine was better than the criticism. Years later he thought he remembered Pearson as an exponent of the psychical view, but rereading the passage found that Pearson opposed it. Still, the view was for him the right one and the opposition mistaken.
I cannot hope ever to know well a better scientific mind than Sewall’s. Our agreement about mind and matter of course pleased me. Another member of the club, the fine physiologist Ralph Gerard, also inclined toward psychicalism. (He, however, was a strict determinist.) Alfred Emerson, the world expert on termites, was an emergent dualist. I think few would see in him a genius comparable to Wright’s. He was, however, stimulating. If I have much general sense of what natural science has been in recent times, I thank chiefly three groups of people for this sense, so far as it goes; first, the pair Peirce and Whitehead, (the former much the stronger of the two as experimentalist); second, the X-Club; and third, the ornithologists I have known. I have also had some friendly acquaintance with physicists, particularly the great Robert Mullikan. But my mathematical illiteracy limits what I can gain from talking to them.
In his autobiography Mortimer Adler discusses the turmoil that began with his coming to the department of philosophy (at Hutchins’s initiative), then led to his being transferred to the Law School (since he had written on evidence at Columbia) and ended finally by his leaving the university. I was on a trip in Europe part of this time. I have no quarrel with Adler’s account of these matters. His philosophical difference from McKeon is somewhat similar to my difference. Adler and I are less willing than McKeon to allow the effort to understand the writings of past philosophers to largely crowd out philosophical understanding of nature and supernature (perhaps even of the great philosophers in their insights and oversights). This does not mean that I learned nothing from McKeon. It is partly because of exposure to his influence that my thinking has acquired so strong an historical slant. I have also learned from his way of contrasting and classifying philosophical approaches, especially about the contrast between Plato and Aristotle, also between Plato and the Neoplatonists, and between Aristotle and medieval disciples of Aristotle.
A friend of mine in Greek studies at Chicago, Brooks Otis, edited a student magazine for which I wrote a two-part essay on my position as neither Thomistic nor close to the Chicago version of Pragmatism. Hutchins wrote me an appreciative response. I had not particularly attacked him. I find it difficult to feel negative about very witty people. It soon became apparent that neither Adler nor McKeon was a Thomist. McKeon was not nearly so far from Dewey in his beliefs as some have supposed.
c) I Become Departmental Secretary;
Visit to Stanford University
Having been made Dean within a few years of his arrival, McKeon found no one in the department who suited him as chairman, and proposed me as “acting secretary.” I told him I did not like the role but he said, “the best administrators are the unwilling ones,” or something like that, with Plato in mind. This was my only administrative experience. It lasted four quarters and was most fortunately ended by my being invited for two quarters to Stanford. Everyone knew I was more than willing to let someone else take the job. McKeon also was more than willing. So everyone was satisfied. The position was given to Charner Perry, to whom no one objected.
One important thing was accomplished while I was secretary. We invited Rudolf Carnap, after much struggle with the administration, to join the department. The idea was Charles Morris’s, between whom and me there have always been friendly feelings. He wanted to invite Reichenbach also, and I, perhaps foolishly, supported this. It would have made the department lopsidedly logical positivist (or logical empiricist). It had one advantage though, it made it possible for the administration to split the difference and resolutely reject Reichenbach but, grudgingly, accept Carnap. I thought Carnap would strengthen the department and that I might learn from him. In both respects I believe I was right. But my supporting Reichenbach also must have made a negative impression on the administration. I agreed with the choice of Camap over Reichenbach.
It became clear before my two quarters at Stanford were over that I was being considered for a position there and that the decision was negative. Again, my teaching was found less impressive than my writing. I was not upset by this. I had some fine students in a fair-sized aesthetics class. Two of the Stanford students I had became more or less successful teachers of philosophy, both emphasizing aesthetics and one, also Whitehead. A third became a now famous abstract painter. Anyway, I did not then feel a need to change jobs.
d) The Federated Theological Faculty; Carnap
One of the important influences that going to U. of C. brought to bear upon me was that of the Divinity School and the three theological seminaries associated with it. Four forms of Protestantism, liberal, highly literate representatives of each form, and all different from the two forms I had been largely brought up on, were involved. These groups became well aware of me and I of them within a few years of my arrival as I began to publish my reflections on the philosophy of religion, after finishing my book on sensation. Dean McKeon disapproved of this turn, saying that philosophy of religion was “less exact” than other aspects of philosophy. However, it was precisely this lack of precision that I saw a chance to correct.
It may well be that had I kept away longer or farther from religious topics than I did my writings might have seemed more relevant to the numerous philosophers who thought as McKeon did about religion, or were still more negative on the subject. On the other hand, I would have seemed less relevant to the likewise numerous scholars who looked upon philosophy primarily for the light it casts upon the validity of religious beliefs. There is some truth in Fritz Marti’s remark that the mass base of a philosophy, if it has one, is in religious people. Anyhow, as theological students began more and more to take courses with me, the Dean of the Divinity School (first Ernest Cadman Colwell and then, as Colwell was promoted to the second highest office in the university, Bernard Loomer, ex-student of mine) felt the need to take me into account in the institutional arrangements. So it came about that, although I taught, with one exception, the same courses as I would have taught anyway, I had a joint appointment, at least financially; half my salary would come from the divinity side. Charner Perry, as chairman, thought this advantageous to the department; for, as he said, “We all know that all your courses are philosophical.” I wish here to say that Perry, in my judgment, agnostic as he was himself, did not underrate my abilities. He once called me a great philosopher, gave my first book high praise, and I recall his saying that I was “more important to the department than Carnap.”
The exception, the one course that was more religious, and perhaps less philosophical, than I would have taught without the theological half of my salary, was a course once taught jointly by me and Daniel Day Williams. His philosophy of religion was largely a deeply felt and well documented version of mine. His The Spirit and Forms of Love is a noble work. He died prematurely.
Considering how different my interests were from those of its other members, I do not charge the department—which I eventually decided to leave—with unfairness or lack of appreciation. T. V. Smith, another agnostic or nontheist whose testimony could be trusted, told me, “We all respect your intellectual abilities.” The member (for some years after Mead left he was chairman) whose interest in religion had most in common with mine was Edward Scribner Ames, author of The Psychology of Religion and pastor of the Disciples Church near the university. He felt it wise to leave his theism vaguer, less rationalized; but he called my attempts in this direction “fascinating,” and he admired me for my editing of and writing about Peirce and called it “Foundation Work.” He did find my claims for Peirce, and by implication for myself, “almost awe-inspiring,” and once told someone how, when he had asked me a question about physics, I had said he should ask Carnap, who knew much more about physics, Ames’s reported comment, somewhat disconcerting to me, was, “For once he was modest.” I’ve had many years now to reflect on that remark.
T. V. Smith and I had remarkably different backgrounds. He grew up in a Texas village of six hundred people where almost no one was educated. (His father did know the Bible but not much more.) After work in the Young Men’s Christian Association, he left all religious affiliations and followed Mead in accepting a wholly nontheistic world view. With fantastic brilliance, considering his start in life, he became a professor at thirty and was elected twice to political office, the second time to a United States Senator’s seat. His writings deal with religion, politics, and ethics. One striking book is on the harm that good men do and is called Beyond Conscience. Perhaps that is the source of my second book’s title, Beyond Humanism. I found his political writings admirable and the rest worth reading. His comment on my work was, “When I can distract my attention from what you are saying enough to notice how you say it, I find your style rather intimately satisfying.” In my speech at the farewell banquet before he left for the University of Syracuse I quoted this remark and said that my experience with T. V.’s writing was, “When I can distract attention sufficiently from the odd way in which he expresses himself, I find what he is saying generally makes good sense.” As an example of the odd style, he entitled an article on the Deweyan ideal (“use your freedom to increase your freedom”) “Always on the Grow.” This was for an article in the Ladies Home Journal. He called his autobiography The Nonexistent Man, on the ground that no one tells the truth about his own past. Actually, it seemed to me, where I also had experienced the facts, that he told the truth pretty well.
With Camap I had reasonably good relations. He was a rather solemn man of essential good will, but deadly serious about his own importance—rather like Husserl in this—an attitude which, some feel, caused him to give inadequate heed to the concerns of his second wife, who nursed him for years because of a back injury. But he was a considerate colleague. He and I could exchange ideas, provided we both, especially I, made a special effort to adapt to the other’s language. In two ways my thinking did interest him somewhat. I had a disproof of the Thomistic idea of God as having complete knowledge of a contingently existing world, although in God there is nothing contingent. Whatever God could be, God is. Yet had there been a different world, God would have had knowledge (which in fact God does not have) that this other possible world existed. Camap was interested in this as test case of the question, “Can such a view as Thomism be refuted by mere logic?” He helped me to formalize my argument so that it seemed to both of us cogent. I still think so.
The other idea of mine that was interesting to Camap was a generalized parallel to his more limited doctrine: whatever can be expressed by using logical constants alone must be noncontingent, either contradictory and necessarily false or else consistent and necessarily true. My generalization broadened the doctrine to include metaphysical categories, ideas in a certain sense as universal as logical constants but not usually included in a list of the latter. This expresses my view of metaphysics as the search for necessary, because strictly universal, concepts. The extralogical terms include modal ones taken as more than merely syntactical, also ideas of experience or knowledge in its most general sense. Camap knew, and either I then already did, or he made me, know, that the following paradox arises from the doctrine, whether in his or in my form. Consider such propositions as, “Only one individual exists,” or “Only ten individuals exist.” No extralogical ideas are involved, yet these propositions are not, and could not be, necessarily true. His solution: always and necessarily there is an infinity of individuals, at least the points in empty space-time. Mine is: the entire reality must always include an infinity of already elapsed events or Whiteheadian actual entities. In either case the propositions stated above are always and necessarily false. Moreover, if one says, “Suppose the proposition is, The total reality now (a problem in relativity physics to be sure) is such and such a finite number of individuals,’ “ then I reply; there is no definite meaning for “now,” from a merely eternal point of view, and all definite fixing of a “now” requires empirical, nonlogical, and nonmetaphysical terms and is contingent.
It seems clear to me that Carnap was closer to my metaphysical position than Quine has been. The two once argued in Chicago about the distinction between a priori and empirical, and the department was unable to see that Quine made his case for rejecting the distinction. Nor am I convinced that he has made his case against modal logic.
Among my students in Chicago, none have been more important to me personally than John Cobb and Schubert Ogden, both internationally known theologians with Methodist backgrounds. Both have excellent understanding of my thought; both are effective teachers and have had significant disciples. Cobb began his teaching and writing career as a philosopher and wrote a fine book on Whitehead. He founded the Center for Process Studies and, with Lewis Ford (for one year my student at Emory University), the journal Process Studies. Cobb has exhibited remarkable ingenuity and organizing ability in bringing together groups of people to consider Whitehead’s or my kind (or kinds) of philosophy in its (or their) bearings on Buddhism, Chinese philosophy, biology, psychiatry, ecology—on the last topic of which he has written a small, characteristically lucid and readable book. I add a third Chicago student, also enrolled in the divinity school, the late Eugene Peters, careful student of my writings and author of two very readable books on process thought. Finally, Eugene Freeman, known to countless philosophers as editor of The Monist and of Open Court (publisher of many philosophical books, including some of mine), was the first doctoral student for whom I was primarily responsible.
Two other students who have since been influential are W. L. Reese and Bernard Loomer, the former with Disciples of Christ religious origins and the latter brought up as a Baptist. There is no denying that response to my teaching has come easier to those with positive religious concerns than to those without them. However, Milton Singer became an important anthropologist who would scarcely fit this pattern. Nor would Lucio Chiaraviglio, who studied with me in both Chicago and Atlanta. He is a philosopher of science and an expert on artificial intelligence.
IX. Emory University (1955-1962) My Third,
and the University Of Texas (1962- ) My Final, University Home
Twice in my career I have left one university for another entirely voluntarily. I left Harvard nonvoluntarily, since they told me they had “no job” for me after my three years as teacher, research worker on Peirce, and, for one year, paper-grader for Whitehead. But in 1955 I left U. of C. voluntarily. No one even hinted that I ought to go elsewhere, and there were some gasps and unmistakable groans when I said that I was leaving for Emory. I did not ask for a raise; I said I was accepting Emory’s offer. Why? It was not for the money, though financial gain there was. It was not rank: I had at last been made a professor, although only with an unexplained delay of a year after Perry assured me my final promotion would go through. The reason for my leaving was none of this. It was my status in relation to the graduate students. I had become aware that, apart from a substantial and much valued portion of my graduate students that came to me from the three theological seminaries joined together with the U. of C. Divinity School under the Federated Theological Faculty (put together by my ex-student Bernard Loomer), most of the graduate students interested in philosophy looked elsewhere than to me for their main intake of wisdom. Either I must resign myself to a hard struggle to overcome this disadvantaged position or admit defeat (for it was a defeat) and make a fresh start, a clear opportunity for which had become available. I thought that the struggle, whatever the probabilities for success, would be a waste of my time and energy.
Who was to blame for the situation? Many people, or no one. One thing was clear, of any blame I must take a share, and I said so at the farewell dinner. In general too much energy goes into blaming someone, some scapegoat, for social troubles. It is usually, if not always, the actions, decisions, inactions, failures to decide, of several, often many persons, in conjunction— and this conjunction is seldom very close to what anyone intended—that has produced or constituted the situation. From any one person’s perspective it is always partly bad or good luck.
I learned from Peirce, once and for all, that chance is the negative side of what Peirce called “spontaneity,” others call freedom, and Bergson, Berdyaev, Whitehead, called creativity; and that both chance and some spontaneity are universal in nature. I did not need Whitehead to teach me this. My first suspicion of it came from William James, though only in relation to the human form of awareness or behavior
I came to Peirce five years later than to James and found that he had, for partly different and more comprehensive reasons, generalized causal freedom infinitely beyond the merely human part of reality. I found Whitehead doing the same, and eventually learned of others who had done this. All of these, with one exception, were writers whose work was done during the last ten or twelve decades. The exception, curiously enough, was Epicurus. He was more than twenty centuries ahead of the world in this respect. Believing that he himself had causal freedom, not the mere voluntariness that some think is all that is needed for responsibility and importance in our behavior, but in a sense involving some degree of randomness, chance, absence of complete determination by the past, he thought that the atoms, fundamental to everything, must also have some degree of this freedom.
Peirce knew about Epicurus, but, unlike a myriad others, he saw that modem science (laws of gases particularly) gives new reasons for such a view, and that it can be cogently argued for on various metaphysical and phenomenological, as well as pragmatic, grounds. Consistently with this, Peirce rated the Stoics, whose logic he knew, lowest of the ancient Greek schools. They fell in love with necessity, absolutized it superstitiously, as though (principle of contrast) necessity would make sense if nonnecessity, contingency, did not. Contingency, Peirce saw, is no mere negation. It is creation, additional definiteness to enrich reality. The created new becomes past and the past is immune to destruction. The past is “the sum of accomplished facts.” These cannot be de-accomplished but are permanent parts of the cosmic poem.
My second voluntary leaving of a good university was for very different reasons. The teaching situation at Emory suited me well the entire time. As at Chicago, there were financial advantages in the move, but they were not the reasons. It happened that the Emory retirement rules (I was then 65) compared very unfavorably to those in Texas, thanks to the philosopher-dean, Albert Brogan, good in both roles, who had put through the most attractive retirement scheme I know of in the country. This was almost reason enough, but not quite. I would have felt more obligated to Emory had not a colleague had a car without seat belts. The statistical facts had been made clear enough by that time (I had even published my view on it), and any adult should have learned that “probability is the guide of life” (again the reality of chance). I am not impressed when someone says, “I do not believe in seat belts.” That only says to me, “He or she does not believe in an elementary bit of the minimal wisdom without which we human beings, by our lack of instinctive guidance, are doubly handicapped.” Anyhow, my wife suffered grievous and not wholly reparable injury partly caused by someone’s or two people’s lack of elementary good sense or thoughtfulness, and by bad luck in a combination of poor drivers in two cars. I put the decision up to Dorothy, asking her to go to Austin (which I had twice visited alone) to see how she liked the people she met and the housing available.” If you like what you find, we’ll go, if not not.” She did like it, bought a house, and we went.
John Silber, departmental chairman who had persuaded me to take the idea of going to Texas seriously, promised that I would be permitted to return to Emory in the late spring for two weeks to help students doing dissertations. The promise, which (like all Silber’s promises to me) was kept, a little diminished the shock of my departure, from what was and is an admirable institution, in some ways better now than it was then.
We now intend to remain in Austin because of many good friends in and out of the university, in which I have status as Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus (since 1978), also because of a home and neighborhood that suit our lifestyle (neither of us wants to drive a car, for one thing), and because we are too busy to face the monstrous task of relocating. As Big Bill Tilden, of tennis fame, whom I once saw play, said: “Never change a winning game” (but— “Always change a losing game”).
X. MY FOREIGN JOURNEYS AND SOJOURNS
In 1948 in Chicago, Ernest Cadman Colwell, president and second to Hutchins, the Chancellor, insisted that I go to Germany for the fall and winter semesters to teach in Getman at the University at Frankfurt. He said someone in philosophy was needed and that I was the one who could do it. Reluctantly I agreed. It meant leaving wife and daughter for months. I did teach in German, no English at all. I also lectured in half a dozen other universities there, giving the German lecture I had written, with some help from the wife of Wilhelm Pauck of the U. of C. Divinity School. She, like her husband, was bilingual. This new task meant that I was forced to do my thinking in another language than previously. In the years 1923 to 1925, as postdoctoral student in Germany, I had thought philosophically in German; but then I was chiefly taking in what was going on in Europe, not working much at developing the philosophy I had put into English in my dissertation at Harvard.
One of my criteria for creativity in philosophers is whether or not they can express their thought in more than one way and are not dependent entirely upon any single word. I have often taught Whitehead without using his terminology at all closely—though in his case I have also found how difficult it is to find other terms as good as those he mostly used. Somewhat similarly with Peirce, who was much more given to inventing wholly new words (sinsign, qualisign, as examples, out of scores). In Frankfurt I could no longer depend upon my previous terminology. I think this must have helped me to become clearer about the difference between verbal and more than verbal disagreements. I have known at least one philosopher who without a certain word had little left to say. Take any technical word from me, and I shall still have much the same things to say, even in English.
To have common ground with my advanced German students (I also taught an elementary course) I chose as seminar topic Leibniz and Whitehead. So I had to figure out how one goes from a seventeenth- and for fourteen years eighteenth-century thinker to a twentieth-century one, or vice versa. It made me vividly aware of the problem of progress in philosophy, since I was comparing two thinkers with similar concerns (mathematics, logic, physics, biology, metaphysics, theology) and with similar aims at clarity and logical cogency, but separated by two and a quarter centuries of intense intellectual effort. I also became aware of the difference between two philosophers who can be imagined to come fairly quickly to an understanding of the relations between their philosophies and to have a good chance of learning from one another, and other pairs of philosophers who could not be expected to do this. Leibniz could have learned from Whitehead much more easily, I think, than from Hegel; Whitehead could hardly be himself and give time and energy to understanding Hegel. The ideals of clarity—crediting Hegel with such an ideal—are not sufficiently close in the two philosophers for this to be conceivable. (Analogously, I have been plentifully exposed to Heidegger and his writings, and to many writings about him, but learned little.) It is arguable that one can learn more from Leibniz than from Kant, considering how much more energy must be put into penetrating the latter’s less clear analyses. Peirce took a hard youthful look at Hegel and gave up. It was not his idea of intellectual method. He did admire Kant. If political philosophy were my specialty, I might feel differently about Hegel than I do.
In vacation I visited Sweden, where Alf Nyman was a reader of my first book and a very astute and learned scholar, interested in one of my problems, indeed several of them. I also visited Basel, Switzerland, and talked to Barth (Karl and his philosophical brother Heinrich) and briefly with Jaspers. I got little from the last, but something rather exciting from Karl: that he very definitely did agree with my contention that there is “change in God.” Later I found it in his Churchly Dogmatics (Edinburgh, 1953-1964, II, 1, pp. 604-640), Barth writes also: [There is] “supreme necessity” as well as “supreme contingency” in God (p. 548). Even Barth thinks partly in twentieth-century terms! I see this as a classical example of what I call “cultural change.” Centuries earlier Socinian theologians said similar things, but who paid any attention to them then on this point? Kant was utterly convinced that God, and any reality beyond mere appearances, must be wholly nontemporal and immutable, and he denied that we could know the contingency even of changing appearances. Aristotle thought (and I think) that he did know this. Here and there, in Germany, France, Italy, the U.S.A., cloudily in Hegel, more clearly in Schelling, still more clearly in Fechner and some other Germans in the last century, in Peirce (somewhat hesitantly and ambiguously), the idea of a temporal aspect of deity began to be taken seriously; but Whitehead was, after Plato, the first major metaphysician to commit himself to the doctrine that God, the eternal reality, is also “in a sense temporal.” At nearly the same time, perhaps wholly independently, Berdyaev expressed a similar view. It was left to me to try to make a better worked out, fully-explicated version of the doctrine in my Dual Transcendence (stimulated by Morris Cohen’s Principle of Polarity and Whitehead’s Dipolarity). It is also a doctrine of dual immanence, and it transforms all sorts of not obviously theological problems in metaphysics. What had been a cry in the wilderness became a worldwide movement, not confined to any religion or denomination. It can be found in one branch of Hinduism, or Islam (via Bergson), or Judaism (the late A. J. Heschel).
In 1951-52 we went to Australia on a Fulbright Professorship. The aim was partly ornithological; I already knew a lot about Eurasian birds, which differ from ours vastly less than the Australian birds do. In Australia, I learned about the influence of Wittgenstein and G. E. Moore, but also much about the avifauna of Australia and (on the way to or from Australia) something of that of the Fiji Islands, New Zealand, and Hawaii. I also made friends with Charles Birch, the biologist who knew of my thought from his professor of biology. I met J. J. C. Smart and J. L. Mackie, who later became much more famous than they were then. Besides teaching in Melbourne, I gave lectures in Sydney, Adelaide, and Tasmania. With Alexander Boyce Gibson, who was responsible for my invitation to Melbourne, I had interesting discussions. He was especially good on Plato’s philosophy of religion.
I met some professional ornithologists in Australia. Eighteen months after the end of my stay in the country, The Emu, the leading Australian journal in the subject, published a long essay of mine on “Musical Values in Australian Bird Songs.” It was my most serious attempt at ornithological writing up to that time. In New Zealand, also, I enjoyed admirable and generous ornithological help, besides giving a philosophical lecture and meeting interesting philosophers in two universities.
The next big trip was in 1958, to Japan, via Hawaii, the Philippines, and Taiwan. The dual interests were to find birds and bird people, and learn Japanese thought, especially Buddhist. I lectured in English, but in Japan almost always with a translator. Again the ornithological aim was achieved nicely, and the philosophical one fairly well. In any case we earned the Fulbright money because my wife was extremely useful, teaching English in the Doshisha University and to Fulbright grantees to the U.S.A., and teaching American school subjects to a group of seventeen children of English-speaking parents, in four different grades, whose teacher had been withdrawn with the occupation forces. I managed to put in some birding in Hawaii, the Philippines and Taiwan on the way to Japan, and to give two lectures in Taipei on my philosophy.
In 1966 occurred our third and last Fulbright journey, first to India, where I gave lectures in several cities and spent two months in Banaras Hindu University as a visiting professor. The stimulus at the latter place was discussing with T. R. V. Murti (who likes to argue) and a number of other scholars, including some disciples of Sri Aurobindo. J. L. Mehta, scholarly writer on Heidegger, and one of the most likable persons we have met, made the unforgettable remark: “Your philosophy and Heidegger’s are so different that they cannot even be compared.” This is a little like the quaint phrase ‘not to mention’, thereby mentioning whatever follows. After India, several places were visited for the birds, on the way to Japan, where I had a Fulbright commission to teach a “summer seminar,” coming between university sessions and meeting for three hours five days a week for several weeks. Ever since I have thought this was and is the right way to teach. Alas, colleges do not do it (with the sole exception of Colorado College, Colorado Springs, where I have taught twice for that very reason). Intellectual creation depends much on concentration. Our standard courses, each meeting for fifty minutes once, twice, or three times a week, do not promote this.
On the way to Japan in 1958, with wonderful luck for us, Arthur Murphy had me teach at the University of Washington for a quarter. Dorothy intensely enjoyed taking courses on Japan. One student in a class I taught there is now the publisher of my books. He never forgot me and my ideas.
A more recent far journey was to Australia in 1974 to attend a World Congress in Ornithology, and at nearly the same time, a meeting of the Australasian Philosophical Society. I gave one philosophical talk at the University of Sydney and a talk to the ornithologists. I came to know D. M. Armstrong, a professed and intelligent materialist, and Keith Campbell, whose interesting Body and Mind defends a “new epiphenomenalism,” according to which “spirit” or “awareness by phenomenal properties” is a nonmaterial effect of certain material causes; but there are no material effects of these nonmaterial effects acting as causes. All causes are material, but some effects are irreducible to anything material. There is no mention of Peirce or Whitehead—or of myself— in the argument given against universal psychicalism, nor is any understanding exhibited of the way these writers argue for a psychical monism. I wonder, too, if the new epiphenomenalism is essentially different from Santayana’s doctrine of spirit.
In 1984 occurred our most recent and I hope last journey to the other side of the world. The reasons for it were two invitations to give keynote addresses: one to a meeting in Hawaii of the Society for Asian and Comparative Philosophy, the other to a meeting in Nagoya of the Japan Society for Process Studies. Both were given to clearly cordial audiences surpassing my hopes. In the first, my subject was “Sankara, Nagarjuna, and Fa Tsang, with Some Western Analogues.” In the second it was, “The Convergence of Eastern and Western Thought.” At both meetings we met many old friends and made some new ones. In Japan we once again admired the extraordinary abilities of the Japanese people and the beauty, the pervasive aesthetic appeal, of the country. On Japanese television we saw a musical comedy that seemed clearly an original Japanese creation, but delightfully melodious, a lithe as though Gilbert and Sullivan had been reborn as Japanese. Without being able to get many of the words we felt that it showed a high level of public entertainment.
The Japanese papers on Whitehead, one on Husserl, seemed competent, some more so than others. None was specifically about my views, but an ex-student of mine, Seisaku Yamamoto, gave a paper on Whitehead. Yutaka Tanaka favorably compared Whitehead’s idea of God and his own Japanese Christian idea which he had acquired from our late Japanese friend Professor Ariga, who invented the word ‘hyathology’ (derived from a Hebrew word) as substitute for ‘ontology’, to indicate that the concrete reality is becoming, not mere being. Ariga and I had agreed that there is in the Bible no ontology, only hyathology. The Hawaiian group, with some scholars representing Buddhism and others Vedantism (one of the latter an old friend from India but half Spanish), was perhaps the most exciting one. The question of intercultural communication was discussed from widely varying perspectives into which my own seemed to fit constructively.
I think the conference gave some support to my view that, profound as the bathers to understanding between languages or cultures may be, the individual or group perspectives within each culture are not much less profound. Everywhere there are the more monistically and the more pluralistically inclined, as well as those who hold a position between the extremes in these respects; also, those who can reasonably be viewed as theists and those either too monistic or too naturalistic, humanistic, or undecided to acknowledge a deity. Everywhere there are those who believe they can accept death as the nullification of our earthly careers (apart from our influences on posterity) and those who hope for the continuation of our individualities in posthumous careers either on earth or in some supernatural heaven.
It is not yet clear how widespread is the Whiteheadian middle ground of “objective immortality in the Consequent Nature of God,” which does not mean any posthumous enjoyments (or sufferings) by us, but rather the everlasting divine appreciation of whatever beauty, aesthetic value, there was in our lives and the lives of those we influence. God becomes the ultimate posterity. I expect this view to gain ground in other cultures; for it is a logical medium between prolongation of personal careers beyond death and mere ceasing to be with death. If all we have ever been, we have been for divine love, we can never cease to be that, since in the divine life, while there is acquisition of novelty, there is no loss. Cumulative divine experience, enjoying all nondivine experience everlastingly (not eternally), is the doctrine that is clearly “this worldly” in one sense and yet answers the question, “How can it matter that or how we have lived if the living just ceases to be, not only for us, but in the end for all others? Indeed, what then remains to make it even true that we have lived as we have?” Objective immortality is a positive answer, and it takes absolutely seriously the proposition, we are to love God, who cherishes all creatures, with all our being. If for God we are to be there forevermore, then death has nullified nothing that we have ever actually achieved or been. And we are to live for no rewards for our actions other than those we can enjoy in this life and with no punishments save those that occur to us before death. We are to love our fellows not for our own or their posthumous advantage, but for their actual or potentional experiences in this life as contributions to the divine life, and to love ourselves for the same reason. Thus we are in ideal to love others literally “as (we love) ourselves.” I see in this a subtle and profound though partial analogy with Buddhism.
I have said nothing about my nine months (1941-42) of teaching at the New School for Social Research in New York City. This was a time of learning from some brilliant German refugee scholars, also of enjoying the wit and wisdom of Horace Kallen, one of the most delightful disciples of William James one could meet. The school was strong in sociology. I wrote for its journal an essay on the Group Mind.
I will mention here my lecturing in England, Scotland, France, Belgium (University of Leuven), Hong Kong, Canada. The Belgian experience was the most recent and intensive of these, a semester’s work in two courses, one taught together with Jan Van der Veken, an extremely intelligent and charming priest, expert on the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty and on that of Whitehead. To some extent the philosophical world is beginning to be one world, with the almost complete exception of Soviet Russia, Communist China, and some parts of the Arab world.
In metaphysical questions, given political and religious freedom, individual differences seem ineradicable. But, and here I agree with the late Richard
McKeon, this should not make peace impossible between groups. Metaphysical insight— I believe there is such a thing—is a privilege, and brute force is not the way to promote it. Of all the great international traditions, the Buddhist has shown the most consistent understanding of this truth. Theist though I am, I never long forget that the misuse of force has rather persistently occurred in groups very free with the name of God. There are tyrant ideas of deity and tyrant ways of professedly doing the will of God. In the nuclear age we must take a fresh look at these matters. The price of mistakes has reached a new high.
Source: The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne, Edited by Lewis Edwin Hahn, pp. 3-45
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