By Charles Hartshorne
Primitive animism and primitive materialism have the same origin, in ancient unawareness of the reality and natures of cells, atoms, and still smaller constituents of visible things. These now known things are ever-active, in a general sense organic, and not demonstrably mindless — even though their collections sometimes appear unmoving. As Leibniz, looking through a microscope, saw obviously alive animals swimming or wiggling about, he almost anticipated the cell theory of animal and plant organisms and still later discoveries. Alas, be almost nullified his insights by allowing not an iota of creaturely freedom. The ghastly formula, “spiritual automatons,” for his monads or individuals, and his book, Theodicy, dealing with a quite deadly form of the atheistic argument from evil, show the extent of his mistake. Causal explanations of concrete things (persons, events) show the possibility, not the necessity, of the things. My parents caused me and five other siblings, I predict no one will ever demonstrate necessity in parent-child relations taken concretely.
Here are the four options or choices in ontology, using M for mind or mentality, B for body, as in some cases at least mindless.
(1) M and B, call it dualism, Descartes and his disciples, who differ from him chiefly by being less clear.
(2) M+ and M−, mind or mentality on higher and lower levels and of many kinds, mentalism, experientialism, psychicalism, or idealism. Leibniz, Troland, Charles Peirce, Bergson, Montague, Whitehead, some Hindus (the Bengali School), Dr. Brahmachari (my student in the University of Chicago).
(3) B+ and B−, reductive materialism (if not reductive, it is dualism, mind emerging from mindless matter. Hobbes, Marx, Engels, many scientists, but far from all.
(4) N+ and N−, neutralism. William James in his empiricism, or consciousness essays [in others, he came close to option (2)], Ann Frankenberry, many others. This tradition tends to take a radically pluralistic form.
My position is that option (2), mentalism, has all the explanatory power of the other three doctrines and more besides. With our current knowledge of the micro-activities, even in so-called inanimate parts of nature, we should apply the least question-begging criterion of the presence of mentality, which is self-activity. This truly Platonic idea is an early version of what Whitehead and numerous others have called creativity.
Mentality in its most primitive form is feeling rather than thought. How much does a baby think? It feels. Feelings exist if they are felt, and they are social or sympathetic so far as one feeler feels feelings of other feelers. This is the basic mind-body relation, in principle so simple that people have trouble believing it. Some have said that we can never understand how bodies have minds or minds bodies. They are right if dualism is correct. But dualism cannot be proved. On this subject the possibilities have been explored, it is time to choose the simplest but most neglected solution: social feeling, as between a human experience and groups of bodily cells, especially those in the central nervous system.
The sympathetic sharing goes both ways; but, since human feelings are vastly superior to those of single cells, you or I can feel the feelings of many cells in a single experience of ours, whereas cells can perhaps do it only with their own molecules or atoms and possibly some neighboring cells. They normally only minimally feel the quality of our experiences, and in dreamless sleep, we may not feel at all. If so, part of the twenty-four hours, our cells are on their own. Perhaps this is always true of cells in the blood stream and outside the central nervous system. This explains why some have said our awareness has no effect on behavior and is a mere epiphenomenon; they only over-stated a real difference. Our bodies are cell colonies, whatever else they are. A tree just is a cell colony, as Whitehead says, a democracy. Animals are autocracies. Plato came close to this, as the ideal: each of us, and other vertebrates, at our best, is analogous to a quasi-deity ruling our bodies; God is the cosmic, supreme case of this. Intensely distressful feelings can cause cancer. Some relatives of mine exemplified that.
Why does everyone not know all this? One reason is, our direct intuitions of concrete actualities are vague, only divine intuitions of the concrete are clear and distinct. Another reason is that even before birth, animals have to learn to focus less on their bodies and more on: mothers, caretakers, teachers, possible enemies and rivals (examples, twins in a womb, or siblings). Many are mistreated or unlucky and embittered by this. Darwin came late in our evolution and many still refuse to learn from him. Even worse, Darwin, like Leibniz, acquired a prejudice from the Enlightenment favoring a view of causality going back more than two thousand years to the Stoics, a doctrine of unqualified necessity, which makes God, at best, a well-meaning, cosmic tyrant, or a sheer absurdity. Epicurus’ belief in necessity and chance (because of multiple freedom) was neglected, as was Plato’s view of God as analogous to a cosmic animal consisting primarily of local animals, in the life of which, whether local or cosmic, there is “both being and becoming.” Newtonian determinism knew nothing of evolution and was scarcely biological.
Since our past partly, though not fully, determines what we are, to know ourselves we need to know our past. In our country most of us fail to do this. Few of our philosophers are good historians; Lovejoy and Harry Wolfson were good, though Wolfson, by his own admission only for the hellenic, medieval, and early modern parts. I have tried through a long life to learn much of this history.
By positivism, I mean negating only what are themselves negations. Determinism, if unqualified or absolute, negates by verbally affirming what transcends human knowledge, does not increase our ability to foresee the future, and only enables some people to stop worrying about the ethical problem of being responsible for doing what, they say, we are causally unable to avoid doing. Since no proof for determinism is possible (ask almost any logician or physicist), the problem is artificial. So-called ‘compatibilism’ is a merely verbal solution of a real problem.
Mentality is not an all or nothing sort of thing, it has a vast range of degrees and kinds: an insect has less of it than small birds, perhaps an infant less of it than a half-grown chimpanzee or a child already able to speak a language at 2 1/2. Then there is genius —Shakespeare, Goethe, Darwin, and the discoverer of the uncertainty aspect of quantum physics, Heisenberg, with whom I had a brief but helpful discussion. The physicist Dirac rejected talk of consciousness “until we know how the brain works,” but accepted indeterminacy. Sewall Wright, great American biologist, was a mentalist who said, “There is nothing but freedom,” in each instance limited by other and previous instances of freedom, Other indeterminists were Crusius (referred to by Kant) and F. Socinus and his disciples.
Leibniz, with all his faults, was almost the first in the West to negate the negation mindless matter. My psychology teacher, Leonard Troland, an engineer, inventor, mentalist — was also a determinist, so, of course, atheist, since, without freedom or truly self-activity, there is no coherent religions meaning. His three-volume work, Psychophysiology, was helpful to me. The mentalist philosophy is presented in a volume four, but it existed only in micro-film. I did not need it, since that question was for me already answered; also, I heard him talk about it. He knew the international, especially German, literature in psychology. He had a neat way of talking about mentalism: our brain cells, he said have sciousness, we have consciousness. Charles Peirce, a mentalist, anticipated this by saying our consciousness is a sort of public spirit in our brain cells.
Against neutralism I argue: trees, rocks, rivers, mountains, a drop or pint of water may not feel, but their cells, atoms, or still smaller active constituents do, for all we could ever know, feel and have a slight sense of past and future, also likes and dislikes. There is talk of excited and satisfied states of atoms. Robert Mulliken, Nobel physicist, once said, “To understand an atom you must sympathize with it.” Then he looked startled by what he had said. Since I agreed with him, I let his remark stand. I had a slight public argument with Einstein on his determinism, also on his indecision about the finitude of space. I hold that time must be infinite but space finite, for space is a complication of time, not time of space. The asymmetry of time — determinism past, but partly to be further-determined future — is what makes life exciting, even to God’s divine life. As Popper said, otherwise God must be bored by an already fully complete cosmic spectacle. Strict symmetry is ugly. Cathedrals have somewhat dissimilar towers, an exquisite church in Paris is remarkably asymmetrical, a church I saw somewhere with duplicate towers was ugly.
In addition to the quantum, another all-or-none case is the transference of electro-chemical energy across synapses in neurons. The inclusive science is psychology in a more than behavioristic sense, and I believe the cosmos includes other solar systems with animal-species, perhaps some superior to us. We are but fragments of the enormous spatial expanse of our cosmic epoch, the mind and body of which are divine, as Plato sometimes said. Such things we can know about only in very abstract and incomplete terms. Above all, without the preservation of the past in the divine actuality, which is much richer than any literal absolute, all our achievements of beautiful experiences would eventually be forgotten “whiffs of insignification.”
Whitehead called Nature an ocean of feelings, Beethoven finds in music as heard only feelings and thoughts. Nor are nightingales in Europe or mocking birds in Southern North America the most musical of song birds. In addition to birds, there are many kinds of singing animals. Time is lacking to list the variety of species other than birds which sing, some magnificently. Several so-called “howling” species sing. Hump-hacked whales are musicians able to learn musical patterns more than 20 minutes long and change them from year to year by an entire group! Some frogs and toads sing, as do many insects. Except in icy cold or extremely dry places, nature is songful at least part of the year. Tropical Africa is one of the most songful regions; the American tropics are less rich, but no song is more exquisitely beautiful than that by the race of Musician Wren in the Amazon Valley in the darkness of (what remains of) the rain forest, near the ground. It has been well recorded and copies can be obtained from the nature museum at the University of Florida at Gainesville, in a disk on wren songs.
Austin, Texas
June 30, 1995
HyC