Charles Hartshorne
“All existences are Buddhahood.” Dogen (Japan, 13th Century).
“On the tablet of the universe is no letter save thy name; By what name then shall we invoke thee ?” Jami (Persia, 15th Century).
The Greeks held that concrete particulars are essentially unintelligible, objects of mere opinion, not knowledge. As men often do, they made their own limitations the measure of things. Since we can have clear, definite, certain knowledge only of abstract forms, they said that it is these alone which are worth knowing. So Aristotle’s God does not even trouble to notice what is going on in the world; He contents Himself with the bare “thinking of thinking.” I see in this view an attempt to make a merit out of our human limitations. Science has achieved its great advances by taking the concrete seriously, and by contenting itself with probability instead of certainty. Even science, to be sure, has had to deal with the concrete somewhat abstractly, ignoring all but the measurable and perceptually identifiable of its characteristics. But it views the abstract as means for the exploring of the more concrete, not vice versa.
Since to God the concrete is an open book, the theist cannot think about these matters as the Greeks did. For the theist wishes to see the creation, if in any way possible, as God sees it; therefore, he must try to understand the concrete as such and to see what it is which we miss through our human restriction to more or less abstract modes of dealing with the world.
Both God and the world can be viewed more or less concretely. Every concrete thing is in its fullness and uniqueness an unfathomable mystery, and in God all mystery is compounded, since God knows and thus contains all things, including all mystery. This mystery of God, however, as we have already noted, is not in the mere concept or essence of “divinity,” but in God as an actuality — not the abstract principle of His knowing, but the actual knowing. Of this we know next to nothing. The mere essence of deity, however, is the principle of all principles, and is really the entirety of what we can know a priori about reality. Those who deny any such a priori knowledge are insofar quite right to reject theism; for as Comte said, any non-empirical knowledge or metaphysics can only be an abstract or desiccated quintessence of theology. Compared to theistic ideas, non-theistic basic principles differ solely by virtue of their inferior clarity or greater ambiguity. They are obscure, rather than mysterious, and their opacity is due to our own mistakes.
Unfortunately, the inherent advantages of theism are often thrown away by the acceptance of concepts which are subtly atheistic, as well as opaque or confused. One such concept is that of substance — not, of course, the mere word, but the pattern of thinking for which the word has almost always been used in technical philosophy. This pattern is destructive of the idea of God in the following ways:
(1) If a human individual is absolutely and perfectly one entity, strictly identical numerically from birth to death — or even for infinite time! — then deity cannot in this respect transcend the human. Numerical identity seems not to admit gradations; if a man is in all circumstances simply the same person, then God can be no more truly identical with Himself. This makes light of and in effect denies the monstrous breaks and shifts in our self-identity — complete breaks, apparently, in deep sleep, enormous shifts from virtually mindless infancy (or existence in the womb) to adult consciousness, from sanity to delirium or virtually-mindless intoxication, etc. Having rendered harmless these creaturely aspects of non-identity, we can then exalt God only by saying that not simply is His “numerical identity” absolute (like ours) but His qualities or states all collapse into one timeless quality or state, without real distinction or succession. In taking this step we do not exalt the identity of God, we merely make of it a self-contradictory blur of notions. Neither “identity” nor “quality” has any recognizable reference where all diversity is denied.
(2) In viewing self-identity as mere numerical oneness, with at most a plurality of qualities, a single noun with many adjectives, we leave it wholly unclear how the many created substances can be “in” God. So we perhaps go to the opposite extreme from “pantheism” (in the sense which takes God to be the mere totality of non-divine things), and take Him to be not even this totality, but something wholly independent and exclusive of it. This makes pure paradox of the divine knowing, since perfect knowledge, at least, must include its objects. It also makes a conundrum of “serving God,” since nothing we can be or produce will literally make any difference at all in Him. It helps not at all here to say that God is immanent as well as transcendent; the relevant question is whether the world is immanent in God.
(3) If I am simply one with myself through time, just a single entity, then when I know myself this must be an absolutely different thing from knowing other substances. Knowing becomes either identity, I know myself because I am myself, or sheer non-identity, as when I know you. And so with loving, or taking an interest in, myself and others. Spiritual categories are not here used to explain self-identity; for that has been taken as irreducible, as an ultimate principle. Since the principle is vague or ambiguous, one tends to fall back upon physical analogies and metaphors. The soul is breath, God is a great sun or an overflowing fountain. Substance philosophies have been tinged with materialism from the beginning. At the crucial points in the argument, it was not concepts like love or knowledge which tipped the balance, but either some physical analogy (which meant analogy with things taken as primitive physics took them, usually wrongly) or else some supposedly self-evident technical concept like that of the numerical identity of substance. The remedy for this is, partly, to think in terms of events, happenings, or acts, rather than of enduring individual things to which events happen. The endurance can then be constructed from relationships, such as remembering and loving, found in the events.
(4) The religious meaning of death and immortality was misconceived in substance philosophies.
The most important result, perhaps, of these aspects of substance thinking has been the dangerous “individualism” of our Western world. Of course there is a noble individualism, but it is very evident that there is an ignoble one. By comparison with Buddhism, wherever this is genuine at all, the ignoble side in our individualist philosophies is nearly always apparent. Also, the immense ethical drive in communism cannot, I am sure, be understood until we see that it means in some respects a higher spiritual level than our official philosophies attain. Communists teach a philosophy of the common good. We either teach or do not make clear that and why we do not teach a philosophy of “enlightened self-interest.” And all four features of substantialism mentioned above help to make this denial of the Great Commandment, “love thy neighbor as thyself,” more or less inevitable. The Buddhist “no-soul” doctrine, which would, I presume, sound shocking to most pious Christians, makes it possible literally to love the other as oneself, i.e., as not another substance.
In the language of events, the whole puzzle begins to clear up. Absolute numerical unity belongs only to the momentary self, all past and future experiences are numerically other; however, with some we may have relations of intimate or wholehearted sympathy or good will, and whether or not these belong to the “same” physical organism, embody the same personality traits or ego, etc., is a secondary question.
The Buddhist-Whiteheadian view also enables us to transcend the communistic paradox that the group is more real than its members. Logically this is without clear sense. Ethically it is dangerous, as most of us in this part of the world realize. Nothing is real but individuals — on the human level, conscious individuals. Groups are not such individuals. But neither are egos, as single entities there for sixty years. No such ego is ever literally conscious of itself.” The self-now is the individual subject actually enjoying the present consciousness; later selves will enjoy it so far as they remember it; past selves did enjoy it only so far as they anticipated it. Any “timelessly the same” self, birth to death, is a mere abstraction. It does not literally do or know anything. But what is more concrete, and the inclusive possessor of value, is not the group, as a super-substance identical through time. It can only be the divine Self-now as inheriting our momentary selves, Itself to be inherited by subsequent divine selves. A kind of neo-trinitarianism can be worked out from this — with, however, an infinity of Holy Spirits, rather than just one. There must indeed be a kind of “begetting” in the divine life.
Theism should take its stand and not let itself be dictated to by bits of philosophy which had no origin in religious insight The concept of creative becoming has a religious origin, for it is the generalization of the divine “fiat” back of the world. Not the Greeks but Philo had this idea; he only failed to generalize it beyond man. Augustine went back to the Greeks and exempted even man (after Adam) from creativity.
Theists should decide what it is they worship. Is it “substance,” “soul,” “immortality,” “the absolute,” “creation ex nihilo?” This last phrase adds scarcely any spiritual insight to the idea of creative fiat, but dangerously hampers its generalization into the idea of a creation of creators. For if we too in our humble way create, then God’s action in the world now does have “materials,” for we have partly made them. “But, at the beginning . . .”? Ah, is it the idea of a beginning which you worship? Do you exalt God’s power by deciding that He has created only a finitude of past time? Whence this passion for limiting God by explicit negations? We forbid Him to be infinite in the temporal span of his sphere of action. At the same time, we also forbid Him to be finite or limited in any way at all in His own actuality, as though the merely unlimited might not be the formless and valueless, the greatest limitation of all! I sincerely believe that our inherited religious doctrines are a m6lange of self-worship, worship of humanity, worship of “substance,” and other tags of Greek philosophy, and — some genuine worship of God!
Another example, closely related to substance, of a non-theistic and confused conception is that of mere matter. Mere matter must mean the zero case of mind, that is, of sentience, memory, and the rest. If God is mind with absolutely infinite capacity (not absolutely infinite actuality, for that is contradictory), then the zero of mind would be the zero of the presence or manifestation of God. Leibniz was among the first in the West to see that this contradicts theism, but some of the Hindus, Chinese, and Japanese saw it in a vaguer fashion long before.
I find in this antimaterialistic implication of theism a confirmation of its correctness. For by what criterion that will survive analysis can one distinguish the zero of mind (and hence, of the presence of God) from the zero of reality. Descartes proposed a clear-cut honest criterion, “extension.” But since he did not show, and no one can show, that mind is in every aspect inextended, the criterion fails. Other criteria differ by being less clear and forthright. It is for this reason that I am unimpressed by the fashionable notion that mind has emerged from mere matter. First show me the mere matter.
I also question if “emergence” as here used has any legitimate meaning. It is not that particular qualities, including qualities of feeling and thinking, cannot emerge unpredictably, or be created. But since any quality, to be known, must become a quality of experience in some form, sensory or affective, mind as such cannot be a mere species of quality; rather, it is the universal correlate of quality, and of quantity as well. It follows that the analogy between any known instance of emergence and the alleged emergence of mind is tenuous in the extreme. Let us take, for example, the emergence of life from lifeless matter. Unless we assume that the lifeless means the mindless, which is the question at issue, all we have to go on here is that out of certain relatively simple physical structures more subtle and complex structures arise. Spatio-temporal configurations alone are involved in the known or non-controversial aspects of the occurrence. In what way is this like the appearance of whole new categories of awareness, feeling, desire, and the like? Starting with the notions of structure and of process as involving an essential aspect of creativity or novelty, we can predict that new structures will keep arising, the novelty varying in degree or extent. However, that something which is not merely spatio-temporal configuration, but the enjoyment, awareness, of configuration, should arise, this is on the premises not only unpredictable, it cannot even be stated without introducing a whole new language, and indeed, without introducing language itself, as entirely new and unpredictable.
Many will say, you forget that mind has been shown to be simply structure and behavior; hence the emergence of mind is merely the appearance of somewhat new modes of behavior.
Here is a nice dilemma. If mind is just behavior, then there is no emergence of mind from mere matter, there is only mere matter, though sometimes it is more complex, and moves about and transforms its shapes in especially elaborate and intricate ways. This is one horn of the dilemma: mind really vanishes from the problem, and so does its alleged explanation. There is nothing to explain — except mere matter, which three thousand years have felt to be a riddle, and most physicists still, I suspect, take to be one. The other horn of the dilemma is, mind is not merely behavior; but then there is simply no analogy at all between its alleged emergence and any established case. The known cases involve either forms of behavior arising from other forms, or forms of experience arising from other forms, as in the development of each individual as he is himself aware of this development. Before we can talk scientifically about experience arising from mere material stuff or process, devoid of experience, we must be able to specify the sort of observations which would falsify the statement, “mind or experience in some form is everywhere.” For millenia (sic) many have believed this proposition; what scientist has any notion of the factual test by which it could be falsified?
That the human type of mind is everywhere is indeed open to factual falsification. Certainly birds do not think or feel just as men do, still less, by all analogy, frogs or amoebae, a fortiori, not molecules. But that they neither think nor feel in any way whatever, complex or simple — what intellectual content does this have? It is an infinite negative which even infinite observation might still not suffice to justify. For an infinity of forms of conceivable feeling might be absent, and yet feeling might be present. Simple infinity is not enough to exhaust the possibilities of feeling and thinking.
If the absence of X in a situation S is not to be established, then neither is its emergence in S. We must content ourselves with the emergence of species of mind, not of mind as such
Similar remarks apply to creative freedom. Specific forms of reedom, such as the human, emerge, but creativity as such cannot significantly be so thought of. And the effort to think it is anti-theistic; for since God is conceived of as infinite creative capacity, the zero of this capacity which determinism posits must be the zero of the manifestation or presence of God. Again, by no criterion can this zero be distinguished from the zero of reality itself. Physics has been coming closer and closer to the realization of this point, which in itself, however, is logical. The logic was first laid bare by philosophers, e.g., Boutroux and Peirce.
Theism is not an adjunct to a world view; fully thought out, it is the most coherent of all explicit world views. To make it incoherent, as dualistic or deterministic systems have done, is an unwitting betrayal. The intellectual and spiritual demands of our time cannot be met in this way. God, if anywhere, must be everywhere, nothing must be the mere opposite of God. If the least particle is “wholly other” than God, then “God” is nonsense. For the word means that nothing could possibly be other than a form of the presence of infinitely creative mind.
I shall give one more example of what this means. Not only does theism exclude even the logical possibility of a zero case of mind or creative freedom, but it excludes the zero case of participation of mind in other mind or, in the broadest sense, “love.” God is infinite love; the zero case of love could only be the total absence of deity. Once more, no criterion is available for such an absolute negation. No animal is absolutely non-social, without indications of sympathy. And nothing could conceivably tell us that an atom has no feeling for the feelings in its particles, or in another atom to whose presence it responds. To retort, as some would, “but no criterion could tell us that the atom does feel,” in the sympathetic or participatory way in question, is open to three objections:
(1) To detect positively and definitely the faintest traces of feeling is a task for unlimited mind, not for such as ours.
(2) Wherever experience is most vivid and clear, careful observation reveals that it has feeling, not an insentient something, as its datum. A toothache, or the memory of an emotional experience in the nearest past, are only the most obvious examples. We can know cases of “feeling of feeling”; in order to know cases of feeling (or experiencing) mere non-feeling, we must have absolute introspective clarity, and this would be superhuman. The positive, not the absolutely negative, is alone accessible to us.
(3) God could detect the least traces of feeling; whereas the notion of God detecting the sheer absence of feeling in a positive reality would mean that God could know something absolutely without loving it, and this conflicts with the idea, implicit in all theism, that universal love of the creatures is His very essence.
Sooner or later, I believe, theists must acquire the courage of their conviction. They must reject all anti-theistic theories of matter and mind, and take the consequences. Then men will begin to see that the recognition of God is not a mere verbalism, or a mere sentimental glow. They will also begin to see that God in His abstract essence is not one more thing, but the reality by which all things whatsoever, actual and possible, are in principle intelligible and also, in the larger context and in some way, beautiful.
The secret of all intellectual advance, overlooked or reduced to triviality in many theories of science, is the drive to uncover the hidden beauty of the universe. The greater the scientist, the more likely he is to feel this. Theism is the hidden principle of all these hidden beauties, a principle not necessarily so very hidden, after all. How hidden it is depends in part upon philosophy and theology, aided no doubt by the inspiring discoveries of science, which keep showing us how much grander the real universe is than even our most hopeful dreams.
“A world in which all things show the presence of freedom and love” may seem too pretty to be true; but since freedom is the source of risk as well as of opportunity, “pretty” is scarcely the word. “Sublimely beautiful” is more appropriate. And what in intellectual history justifies us in expecting the truth to be as tame as our market-place common sense? From that standpoint, the astronomer and physicist are stark mad. What, the moon falling perpetually toward the earth, like an apple, and the earth toward the sun! Billions of tiny animals making up the human body! Atoms in an “excited state”! Matter created and destroyed!
Perhaps there is no very radical difference between the man who says that to attribute feeling to inanimate nature “is to attribute human traits to the sub-human,” and the man who says, But surely the earth is not like a falling apple, or surely solid matter is not full of waves and motions swifter than sound, or surely if a paramcecium is an animal it must have eyes and ears like a rabbit, or surely a bird cannot feel “territorially” possessive. (An ornithologist objected to the use of this term because birds have no legal concept of ownership.) At what point does the refusal to generalize concepts “rashly” or beyond good sense become merely the inability or refusal to generalize — period?
You may reply, it is the point beyond which no further predictive power is achieved. Yet metaphysical universals by very definition and intention are not predictive. And does any prediction follow from, “There are (or at least logically could be) parts of nature which neither as wholes nor in their parts have feeling”? Dualistic or materialistic metaphysics in this sense makes no testable prediction either. So why assert it? For, in addition to predicting nothing, it lacks conceptual unity, since it puts together two kinds of physical thing, and covers the duality with the idle phrase, “emergent quality.” No explanation is or can be given as to why mere matter should produce mind, or why mind needs mere matter. (The need cannot be in order to have objects, since experiences can be and are objects for other experiences, e.g., in memory; and since abstractions, such as numbers, or the idea of “object,” can also be objects.) The psychicalist, on the other hand, can explain all known facts about the empirical world so far as anyone can, and explain them economically by a single principle, love or creative participation as capable of many degrees and kinds. He has the same predictive power, and by far the greater conceptual clarity and beauty.
The theist has something more; he has the key to facts and the key to values in a single idea, since participation, i.e., love, is traditionally recognized as in some manner the supreme ethical standard. To find the key to facts and values in the same principle is, I submit, an intellectual achievement than which none could be greater. In this respect, what rival could theism have? Its serious rivals are the pseudo-theisms, the idols to which the name of God, or the attitude of worship, has, with insufficient caution, been attached.
Here is a reason for “theological rancor.” We theists can scarcely doubt that the primary theoretical enemy is in our own ranks. As Blake put it, once for all, “Your vision is my vision’s dearest enemy.” Where else could the enemy be found? Among the communists? Not if it is an essentially theoretical enemy we are speaking of. Let communists cease appealing, like the Popes of old, to force or material power to settle theoretical and spiritual questions, and we shall see whether they can stand on their own feet intellectually. In mere skepticism? It is belief which drives the world. Science itself is faith in the inexhaustible beauty of truth. Who but the theist has the key to that beauty?
Lest this advantage go to his head, the theist should be reminded that it profits him little to know that theism is the key to the world’s beauty unless he can be sure that he has the key to theism itself. An ugly, illogical mess, which is what many theists as well as atheists see in the views of various other theists, is not, for practical purposes, the key to much of anything. We must, with patience and good humor, submit the possible forms of theism to every test that seems relevant, and try to face honestly the indications that some of these formulations, including certain much venerated ones, fail to pass them. Meantime all theists should mitigate their rancor, partly by bearing in mind that life is much more than theory, and that the man who says Lord, Lord, like the man who never says Lord, or whatever we think the right word is, may or may not be serving the Lord’s cause; partly also by taking into account the verbal elements in all controversy and the open question how far human language and mental operations are capable of achieving simply right results in fundamental matters; finally by applying the injunction to love one s neighbor as oneself even to theologians and philosophers.
But what of the view that a certain Church is infallibly right in religious matters? I find this a most puzzling claim. For the doctrine of infallibility is either a theory, and then like any theory it can be doubted, and can hardly be proved by infallible reasoning to be correct, or it is itself a mere pronouncement by the authority said to be infallible. But by what infallible method does one choose the authority, or even know that there is one? I have never been able to see how, by a rational argument that God might be expected to furnish us with a strictly reliable guide to His existence and nature, and another argument supporting a certain choice as to which of the claimants to this role is the true guide, we could have more than at best a fallible knowledge that the said guide is infallible. Or do we have an infallible intuition to this effect? And do we infallibly intuit that we have this infallible intuition? Perhaps I am merely confused in all this, perhaps there is some way through this labyrinth. But to me it seems more reasonable to accept human fallibility as covering all human institutions whatsoever.
If anything important is infallibly known, I should think it is the appropriateness of love, or the transcendence of mere selfishness, as the ideal of action. In this, I do have almost the sense that we could not be mistaken. And for me it is no long step from this to the acceptance of belief in divine love. But I have to admit that short as the step is, it is strangely barred by the most amazing entanglements of historical doctrine and controversy. The history of theology is something I could never have imagined; it is indeed “a world I never made.” But the history of atheism is also strange, especially in its recent chapters. That is the odd sort of creatures we are — at least, to one another.
If, according to a consequent theism, all reality must exhibit the presence of deity, this applies also to language as a reality.1 One way in which language can exhibit deity is by having implicit or explicit rules which validate Anselm’s Principle, the necessity of the divine existence. Any language whose rules do this may be termed pious in principle; a language which treats all existence as contingent is impious in principle. For, as Findlay showed, if it needed showing (and apparently it did, since the truth is not even yet taken into account in the literature): to deny Anselm’s Principle is to deny the logical possibility of God’s existence. Thus there can be no religiously neutral language, except through vagueness in the rules of existential assertion. Our official philosophical language, in spite of its pretended neutrality, has been so taken as to be almost overtly impious, in seeming to imply the contingency of all existence. The move next in order is to face the decision more consciously and squarely, should it or should it not be so?
I believe it to be to the advantage of theism that this austere alternative should be dealt with as honestly as possible. I have enough faith in the wisdom of belief to think that the sharper we make the implications of worship, the better it will be for the future of religion and of mankind. The theistic question — it seems necessary to say it again and again — is not one more question, even the most important one. It is, on the fundamental level, and when all its implications are taken into account, the sole question. Linguistic analysis which fails to grasp this is not, whatever else it may be, analysis of the basic metaphysical idea. Whether and how we conceive the God of worship, in His necessary, eternal aspect, this is all that is left when empirical accidents of the world, including language as accidental, are set aside. Philosophy as a non-empirical study has no other subject-matter. Here Comte and Anselm come into a strange agreement.
If philosophy is not the rational element in religion, then it is an assortment of implicitly independent specialties (logic, linguistics, history of ideas, theory of fine arts, etc.). Or it is the cultivation, by more or less rational methods, of the theoretical side of the art of living. But living for what? Be the aim Nirvana, the Classless Society, the Welfare State, Self-realization, the query is never silenced, what good is it, from the cosmic and everlasting perspective, that one or other or all of these aims be attained for a time on this ball of rock? (And if one does not view the matter from the wide perspective, why raise the theoretical question at all; does reason accept such limitations upon its own scope?)
Only through a relationship to the Everlasting Itself, it seems evident, can the query concerning the aim of life have an answer which avoids giving rise to a still more ultimate query.
Note
1. Ian T. Ramsey, in Religious Language (London: SCM Press, 1957), pp. 59-60, says that “the word God presides over the rest of language.”
* * *
This essay appears in Hartshorne’s book, The Logic of Perfection, pp. 118-132.
HyC