Charles Hartshorne
Except for a hasty reading of The Concept of Nature and a still hastier perusal of early, passages in Principia Mathematica, I was, as a graduate student at Harvard, unacquainted with Whitehead and his philosophy. However, in 1925, as a young instructor, I began to hear him lecture, to grade student papers for him, and as his metaphysical writings began to appear, to read him intensively, while also, still more intensively, studying the writings of Charles Peirce.
For the first time, after eight years as a college or university student, in this country and in Germany, I had the feeling of encountering philosophic genius in a congenial form and, in these two men, of encountering it twice over. For the first time, too, I found myself a warm partisan, under some temptation to substitute acceptance for critical evaluation. What I wrote about Peirce (most of it not published) in the late 1920s shows the strength of this temptation fully as much as what I wrote (mostly somewhat later).about Whitehead. In the course of the nearly forty years since my (and Paul Weiss’s) editing of Peirce, I have grown more objective, especially about Peirce.
To illustrate three of the many aspects in which Peirce and Whitehead were more “congenial” to my way of thinking than my undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral teachers, much as I learned from them, I select the following. I wrote a class essay (about 1922) entitled, “The Self Its Own Maker.” Thus I was prepared for Peirce’s generalization in his category of “spontaneity” or “Firstness,” and for Whitehead’s in his “Creativity” or “The self-created creature.” I also wrote an essay defending the idea that it is a metaphysical blunder to base the justification of altruism upon self-interest, since the fundamental principle is love, self-love being but one expression out of many of this principle and in no sense its source or ground.
Both Peirce and, especially, Whitehead have their versions of this doctrine, which I had previously found (less clearly stated) in Royce—and in Saint Paul’s “we are members one of another.” A third aspect of the partial “pre-established harmony” between me and my two chief inspirers was this: the only one of my Harvard teachers who was impressive as an interpreter of religion took personal immortality to be central, whereas for me this had long ceased to be, if it ever had been, a prominent aspect of the religious life. Here, too, Peirce and Whitehead were my kind of philosophers. For them also the “otherworldly” and undying factor is simply God himself, “the poet of the world” (Whitehead’s phrase, but Peirce has the idea). Our permanence is in the way our earthly lives are woven (in part self-woven) into the poem, not in posthumous careers of our own.
On the three issues just mentioned, and many others, Whitehead seems to me clearly to have the more balanced and adequate doctrine. However, certain formulations of Whitehead (to be mentioned presently) which I have never been able to accept are not found in Peirce. Thus my development, from a brash young metaphysician (with already some local reputation for originality) who wrote a dissertation on “The Unity of Being in the Divine or Absolute Good” to—whatever I am today, came about in part through a sort of trialogue with two men of Leibniz-like scope and originality, almost entirely independent of one another, but with encouraging similarities and stimulating differences. If this was not good luck, what would be?
The essays span the years 1935-70. During this time my attitude toward Whitehead has undergone no drastic change. Throughout I took from him ideas I could assimilate, and ignored or touched on critically those I could not. I never cared for his “eternal objects,” as a definite yet primordial multitude of “forms” of feeling or sensation, or for his analysis of the becoming of an actual entity (a concrete unit-happening) into “early” and “late” phases. I never could see in the “perishing” of actual entities anything more than a misleading metaphor which, taken literally, contradicts the dictum, entities “become but do not change.” An entity becomes during (from an external point of view) a finite time and is succeeded by other actualities which objectify it along with their other predecessors, the objectifications being more or less abstract or deficient (qualified by “negative prehensions”) except for the divine objectifications, in which, as I construe Whitehead, “there is no loss, no obstruction” or deficiency.
On one point there has been a change. For some years I disputed Whitehead’s doctrine of the mutual independence of contemporary actualities. More recently I have defended Whitehead’s view and regarded my early arguments to the contrary as mistaken. Two other changes, more of emphasis than of conviction, are the following. In several early essays I talk solely in terms of enduring individuals (Whitehead’s “societies of occasions,” especially those purely linear societies termed “personally ordered”), even calling them “substances,” in spite of the fact that in the early twenties The Concept of Nature had convinced me that events are the concrete units of reality, not things, persons, or substances; also in spite of the fact that the doctrine of the discontinuity of becoming, the notion of objectively singular happenings, defended in the later works had never, once I encountered it, seemed to me mistaken. But I was slow to assimilate it fully to the extent of remembering it whenever it was relevant. I regard this as a real defect in chapters 4 and 5.
A similar slowness of assimilation is shown in the way I used to write as though it was only memory, in the usual sense, that connects experiences to the past, whereas I have never, so far as I recall, rejected the evidence, or Whitehead’s assertions, concerning the equally retrospective reference of perception. This confusion was cleared up once I had formulated the distinction between “personal” and “impersonal memory,” the latter being the same as perception. Memory in the generalized sense common to both forms is Whitehead’s “prehension.” I have little doubt that Whitehead would have liked this formulation, which is plainly implicit in his declaration that “causality is physical memory,” since it is quite obvious that the standard personal meaning of memory (continued accessibility of one’s own past experiences) will cover only one “strand” (in Whitehead’s phrase) of causal connectedness.
The reader will see, I imagine, that my primary aim has always been to arrive at truth through Whitehead, or to make truth accessible to others through him, more than to ascertain or communicate the truth about Whitehead. In general I have tended to attribute to other philosophers as many acceptable ideas as possible. This may well have caused me, at times, to flatter the writers dealt with, making them even wiser than they were. Whitehead himself, somewhat notoriously, did this. My only defense is that this is at least better than the opposite procedure, making others more foolish than they really are. I have been particularly careful, for instance in the hundred book reviews I have written, to avoid the straw-man fallacy, attacking a man for holding opinions he in fact does not hold and could not reasonably be shown to have held. Nor do I recall being, as a reviewer,accused of this practice, which always confronts astute readers with the dilemma: Is the writer stupid, or is he too mean or lazy to allow the other fellow to stand or fall by what he actually thinks or writes?
It is already clear that my way of construing Whitehead is only one of indefinitely many ways, past and to come. If I have overpraised Whitehead, itseems safe to say that this excess of appreciation is at least balanced by the remarkable deficiency in the response Whitehead has received from the country in which he was born and educated and passed the first forty years of his adult career.
This reminds me that I have, in none of the essays, paid sufficient attention to Whitehead’s relations to the British tradition in philosophy. Kant has often been extolled as the highly original German philosopher who did some justice to both Continental and British traditions. It is obvious that Whitehead can quite as readily be credited with being the highly original English or Anglo-American philosopher who assimilated essential aspects of Continental philosophy. In my opinion he understood Locke, Berkeley, Hume (also James), as well as Kant did Leibniz, and he had profound points of conscious agreement with all the great Continentals.
Thus, for example, he was the first great system maker after Leibniz who made real use of the obvious point that man is far from the only kind of animal that has “experience,” if this means perception, memory, learning, emotion, and purpose—or response to events as causes with expectable effects. What real use did the British, or Kant, or even Hegel, make of this truism? By generalizing fully the idea of varieties of subhuman experience Whitehead, here agreeing with Leibniz and Peirce, shows that the whole of nature can be interpreted in such terms. Agreeing with Berkeley and Leibniz, against Descartes and Locke, that mere extension, mere “primary qualities,” cannot constitute the essence of anything concrete or actual, he also agrees with Leibniz and Kant that nature cannot be a mere set of ideas in human or superhuman minds; but at the same time, with the Hegelians, he sees that the idea of a thing in itself, both appearing to, and yet wholly hidden from, our awareness is an absurdity.
Yet with Locke [and Leibniz] he can agree that the “constitution” of objects is indeed largely hidden from our direct and distinct perceptions. With Hume he is entirely convinced that mere dead bodies moving about cannot as such exhibit the causal connectedness of successive events; but with Kant (and how much more clearly) he sees that it is the temporal structure of experience as experience that constitutes the connectedness. With Hume, but unlike Kant, he sees that a merely infinite, absolute, immutable deity is an empty abstraction, and with Hegel (but how much more clearly) he knows that and how “the truth is the union of opposites,” such as absolute and relative, infinite and finite, object and subject.
British philosophy has tended to be realistic—Berkeley’s epistemology being an extreme, and Hume’s skepticism a milder exception—especially taking this present century into account. Whitehead has discovered the very secret of realism, missed by nearly all previous philosophers: the temporal structure of experience-and-experienced, the paradigm of which is memory. Before Whitehead, did anyone unequivocally (Peirce and Bergson almost did it) perform the intellectual experiment of taking advantage of the known fact that distant events have already happened when we perceive them to convert the pseudoaxiom, “we cannot in memory intuit, enjoy as data, past events since these no longer exist” into the veritable axiom: Only events which have actually happened can be definite actualities, as such data for experience, since what is now happening is merely nascent actuality, not yet ready for objectification? In this sense memory furnishes the key to perception, not the other way.
Here Whitehead is profoundly original, as he is in his concept of the objectively singular event or actual entity. (In both points, apparently without knowing it, he was anticipated by ancient Buddhism.) Through these ideas, the taint of subjectivism haunting modern philosophy (we are only aware of that very awareness itself) is definitely overcome. Every actual entity has other such entities given to it, and their otherness is guaranteed by their temporal priority. Yet the basic insight of all idealism and nearly all Asiatic philosophy that mere dead matter is but an abstraction and not a possible concrete reality is fully assimilated into Whitehead’s system. Actual entities are experiences functioning as objects for subsequent experiences, which may or may not belong to the same personal stream of consciousness. Every kind of solipsism is as foreign to this view as every kind of mind-and-mere-matter dualism. Thus some of the worst diseases of modern thought are transcended. I add one more disease, the habit of skipping over the body in dealing with the question: How do we know (extrabodily) objects? Whitehead (like Merleau-Ponty later) never forgets, in his theory of perception, that experience is of bodily process, whatever other data there may be.
Probably it should not surprise us that so much insight should baffle many; perhaps particularly so in a tradition which has tended to make a merit of caution, unambitiousness, and amateurishness in philosophy. Whitehead was a highly technical and professional, as well as daring, philosopher in the decade 1925-35, in spite of having been chiefly amathematician during most of his previous life. He came to philosophy much as Plato thought one should, but as “English Platonists” have generally not done, via intensive study of “geometry” as well as reflection upon the good and life generally. He had one thing Plato lacked, a developed formal logic as instrument in analyzing ideas.
But, unlike some modern logicians, he knew or shrewdly guessed how far this logic was from fully exhibiting the structure of basic ideas; and this, I suspect, was one reason why, in his mature system, he seems to be making almost no use of that logic. Yet it is having a pervasive influence all the while. For one thing, it is probably a chief source of his insight, so rare in philosophy, into the dual necessity of admitting both intrinsic relational predicates (internal relations) and nonintrinsic relational predicates. Green, Bradley, Bosanquet, Joachim, Howison, and Royce lacked one side of this insight; Moore, Russell, at least the early Wittgenstein, R. B. Perry, Spaulding, even to some extent James, lacked the other. Peirce and Whitehead are nearly alone in seeing both. . . .
Perhaps the most serious conflict between Whiteheadians and their philosophical contemporaries arises from the trend toward extreme behaviorism, a trend encouraged by the writings of Wittgenstein and Ryle as these are sometimes, possibly wrongly, interpreted. I remark: this issue is as old as Greek atomism; it has always left and, in spite of Feyerabend and others, still leaves unexplained almost everything, secondary and tertiary qualities, the unity of experience, whether at a moment or through time, our basic categories of causal influence and order, our freedom, what you will.
As Peirce said, materialism leaves the world about as unintelligible as it finds it.Physical things, merely as such, are nothing but changing and moving shapes, the so-called primary properties. And these, in Whitehead’s analysis, are simply very abstract, purely relational aspects of mind (subjectivity, feeling) on various levels. Materialism differs from Whiteheadianism by no positive assertions but solely by its omissions and denials. Nor have we been told how it could be known that such things as molecules lack even the most rudimentary forms of feeling.
Contemporary materialism appeals to the necessity that words have public significance. But there seems no real difficulty in understanding, on Whitehead’s theory, how we can learn the meaning of words like pain, sorrow, joy, memory, perception, in spite of a certain limited privacy of these aspects of experience. “I am aware of having just felt or perceived a certain something in a certain way” is markedly different from “I am aware of your having just felt or perceived it in a certain way.” Even more obviously, “I am aware of having just dreamt a certain dream” differs from “I am aware of your having just dreamt a certain dream.”
These scarcely deniable differences are all that Whitehead needs. He has no need, on his premises, of asserting any absolute inaccessibility or incomparability of the experiences of subjects. The denial that momentary human experiences are real and unitary events seems to me purely dogmatic. Nor does it follow from the admitted truth, the reason for which Whitehead carefully explains, that the experiences are impossible without certain physiological occurrences. I wonder if current linguistic theory furnishes a reason, or only an excuse, for the materialistic preference?]
It is curious to reflect that, just as it was not Kant, but the more extremely Germanic Hegel, and later Heidegger, who really dominated German thought, so it has not, so far, been Whitehead but the more extremely British thinkers Russell, Moore, Ryle, Wisdom, Austin, and their followers, with the unclassifiable Wittgenstein (who in his later phase is, in an eccentric manner, ultra-British too) who dominate in Britain. In the more chaotic and in a significant sense freer arena in North America, no one quite dominates; and every idea, if intelligently advocated, has a chance. Whitehead preferred itthat way, as do I.
Source:
Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead’s Philosophy: Selected Essays, 1935-1970, Chapter 1, pp. 1-9.