Charles Hartshorne: Philosopher, Scientist, and Metaphysician
By Romana Annette 02/06/2007
The first paragraph of Charles Hartshorne’s obituary, as taken from the New York Times, October 13, 2000, reads as follows: “Charles Hartshorne, a philosopher, theologian and educator who wrote more than 20 books and 100 articles in a lifelong mission to prove that God was a participant in cosmic evolution rather than the supreme composer, died on Tuesday at his home in Austin, Tex. He was 103.”
Many refer to Charles Hartshorne as the Einstein of Modern Philosophy.
While Hartshorne is not exactly famous in most circles, it was he that brought a new level of maturity to the constantly developing philosophical vehicle that is called Process Theology (see Appendix B.) Hartshorne modeled God, to develop a version of God that was compatible with all models of reality, both scientific and philosophical.
Hartshorne was a Unitarian Universalist, but he is often omitted from directories of famous Unitarians. Hartshorne’s church affiliation should not be surprising, since Process Theology, besides promoting a design for reality possessing great unity, is also somewhat non-Trinitarian. Hartshorne’s highly progressive theology is deeply disturbing to people in both the radical atheist and radical fundamentalist camps, and possibly even to many of his fellow Unitarians, since Hartshorne is more concerned with the nature of God, rather than the existence of God, per se.
Hartshorne was a successor to
the renowned philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Hartshorne developed what he considered to be
the more real, rather than the simply abstract, aspects of Whitehead’s
teachings. One of the still-living
philosophers, heavily influenced by Hartshorne, is John B. Cobb, professor
emeritus of Claremont School of Theology in
As has become typical in Process Theology, Hartshorne developed new and progressive attributes to define his version of God, a version of God incompatible with half of the many descriptions in the Bible. This earned him detractors in the Bible as Inerrant Truth camps, since many consider it blasphemous to even consider challenging biblical orthodoxy.
Above all, Hartshorne stressed that any model of reality, even one including God, has to be natural.
It is difficult to dissect Process Theology to isolate just those ideas developed by Charles Hartshorne, because it is impossible to tell where Hartshorne’s additions, and pre-Hartshorne Process Theology, begin and end. However, he can be said to be the father of panentheism, which means God is in all, while not being all. This is in contrast to pantheism, where God is all, and to deism, where God is totally separate.
In panentheism, God is dipolar, or, one could simply say polar, representing the interdependent opposites so necessary for reality to work. Panentheism has spread to become an integral part of many progressive churches, since it supplies a way of dealing with all those annoying paradoxes that are so common in conventional religion.
Panentheism allows a reality to exist where no one knows everything, where there can be total freedom without any coercion (at least, by God,) where the future is never pre-written, and where there are no philosophically incorrect paradoxes or dualisms. As a transcendent (vertical) entity, God is the perfectly-loving parent, who accepts the totality of current reality, and as an immanent (horizontal) entity, God actively embraces all the new stuff that comes into being. Because of this built-in polarity, God can only be persuasive, not coercive.
God is at least an entity, in process terms, but not necessarily a being, and is certainly not created in our image. God is omniscient only in the sense that God possesses the sum of all past experience. This is often referred to as Objective Immortality, to which every living thing can possibly form links to smooth over the gaps of knowledge in their daily lives. This is also called God-relatedness.
I will now state the Five Principles of Process Theology, which were heavily influenced by Hartshorne. Note that it is far easier to contemplate what God is not, than what God is:
· God is not a cosmic moralist.
· God is not unchanging, and not passionlessly absolute.
· God is not a controlling power.
· God is not a Sanctioner of the status quo.
· God is not male.
Hartshorne devised sixteen points of proof, but I will not go into them here (see Appendix A.) Since no one can ever prove anything ultimately, there is really no way to prove or disprove the existence of or any model of God.
By the mid-1990’s, Hartshorne’s wife died, and he was growing frail, so he was unable to integrate the latest developments in theoretical physics into his models. Unlike Hartshorne, many scientists had claimed that materialistic science alone would provide answers to the ultimate questions; yet, physics has now become more philosophical than scientific.
String Theory, and its multi-dimensional child, M-Theory, are the important frontier of theoretical physics; yet, neither of these theories seem provable in the near future. These theories, just as those in the past, will allow use to make educated guesses to advance our level of technology, without a truly deep understanding of the science involved.
Physicists are still desperately trying to devise the ultimate Theory of Everything. However, reality looks ever more like a Rube Goldberg device, put together by a committee that scarcely talked to each other. When one adds extra physical dimensionality, and multiple and codependent universes, reality becomes too complex and multi-threaded for anyone to comprehend.
Still, there must be a unifying force or principle keeping reality together, running, and evolving, which greatly resembles Hartshorne’s vision of God.
Hartshorne intended that his model apply to all possible states of matter and living things, but it is subject to human-based biases. Others want it to speak to destiny and ultimate meaning, so that they can justify their lives.
God, as envisioned by Hartshorne, could not answer such questions, because current experience is always relational, not absolute. In fact, panentheism would imply that God needs our help just as much as we need his/her help.
This is only a glimpse of Process Theology, which is constantly being revised by explorers of reality. Since it is quite intellectual and sometimes abstract, it unfortunately takes time for any components to be adapted to our daily lives.
Detractors are quite right that Process Theology itself does not offer a clear vision of hope and promise or provide any kind of ultimate meaning for life, but how could such ideas be species-independent? Rather than waiting for external factors to come to our aid, it seems that we need to develop a philosophy of our own that properly integrates us with the rest of reality.
Appendix A: as found on http://www.hyattcarter.com/hartshorne.htm.
Why Classical Theism Has Been Believed By So Many For So Long
Charles Hartshorne
OF the many forms of theism, one form, held by numerous Christian, Islamic, and to a lesser extent Jewish theologians, has shown a remarkable power to convince thoughtful people. True, it began to lose this power in the Enlightenment, but the Protestant Reformation left it largely intact, or even worsened its faults. I’m thinking of the absurd view of omnipotence as power to make the creatures’ decisions for them, as though these could then be their decisions. In short, supreme freedom was taken to be the only freedom. I’m also thinking of Luther’s cruelty to the rebelling peasants, and of Calvin’s disciples’ burning of Servetus at the stake. (If there is any wickedness inherent in human nature, is it not shown in the latter hideous action?) The point is not that Luther’s or Calvin’s beliefs implied (or did not imply) the correctness of such behavior. The point is that Luther’s or Calvin’s voice was not literally the voice of God, nor are words in the Bible literally words of God. No human individual is entitled to claim infallible knowledge, and surely not of the precise degree of truth in a book set down in words by various human authors (or translators) in various human languages. For the worship of an allegedly (in certain of its functions) infallible church, the mainstream Reformers substituted an allegedly infallible book which they could (infallibly?) understand. They committed the religious sins of idolatry and also of fantastic degrees of "pride," in claiming to know that one human group, institution, or document is beyond criticism, just as God is. Apart from the collective conceit or arrogance shown in this, what about the implausibility of any such absolute knowledge by human beings? And to kill or torture to death on the basis of such a claim, if not near insanity, is certainly most wicked.
There is a conceptual, systematic reason why, in spite of the foregoing, there are still classical theists. The most true view, one might argue, must be the extreme opposite of the most false view. This seems but is not a counterexample to the principle that errors or departures from truth come in opposite extremes—as, according to Aristotle, do departures from virtue. With the help of a deceased lady artist student and a German writer (Dessoir) on aesthetics, I have been able to show that beauty too is a mean between extremes, and with Bosanquet to show that ugliness is not the opposite of beauty. Ugliness is not sheer disorder and beauty is not sheer, unrelieved order. Beauty is rather the mean between these extremes in one dimension and also the mean between two other extremes in another dimension. The sublime, comic, tragic, pretty, and neat or tidy have their places in the scheme (see chap. 12).
It remains correct that the most true view must be the extreme opposite of the most false one. By this test, however, classical theism fails, though it takes some care and subtlety to see this. In classical theism God is wholly necessary and the world wholly contingent. Symbolized by N. c, the widely accepted doctrine is surely more true than its opposite C.n, at least for theisms in the high religions. (Capital letters refer to God, lowercase letters to World, or what is not God. Thus C, used apart from N, means, God is contingent and only contingent; n used apart means, World is necessary and only necessary. NC.cn [the permutation in cn is neutral to questions at issue in this essay] means, God is both necessary and contingent, world is both contingent and necessary.) Obviously a wholly necessary created world could not depend on a wholly contingent Creator. So the opposite of classical theism is definitely false of the God of the high religions. But is it the extreme or complete opposite, is it the most, or wholly, false? Overlooked for about two millennia was the logical point that, since the most false view must be most opposite to or negative of the most true view, if we know what the former would be, we need only a small step of reasoning to arrive at the most true view: simply negate every negative feature of the false view. This is not done by merely reversing the modal poles as between God and World. Many writers, especially among critics of the Ontological Argument, deny that necessity can apply to being or existing. Kant, preceded by Gassendi, is one of these writers. Descartes defended himself ably against Gassendi, hence in effect against Kant! To assume that C.n is the most complete negation of N.c is to beg the question against NC.cn, which overlaps positively with both N.c and C.n. Only one of the sixteen options expressible in this symbolism has a complete opposite, or negative, and that is NC.cn, which is completely negated by O.o (or Z.z) the interpretation of which is the same as that for OO.oo. (O here means neither contingent nor necessary, and Z is for zero). And what is that but impossible? The smoking gun, the real enemy, is the theologia negativa.
I ask, What classical theist or pantheist ever so much as mentioned NC.cn, in any definite symbolism? This neglect is not disposed of by calling NC a contradiction, since formal logic only requires that incompatible predicates apply to different respects, parts, or aspects of a subject. True enough, classical theism denies the possibility of real respects, aspects, or parts in the divine actuality, but this too is merely a dogma, not an established premise for argument. For partisans of NC.cn, God is both the simplest and the most complex of all beings, simple in essence but not in accidents, which are vastly, even infinitely, complex. God as both essence and accidents is the divine actuality which, as I have shown, is very different from mere existence even in ordinary cases, as in an animal or person. Existence (as follows from Whitehead’s categories, though he never quite tells us so) is definable in terms of actuality and essence (some specifiable predicate). Actuality is how, or in what concrete thing or things, an essence is actualized; mere existence is only that the essence is somehow or in something concretely actualized. Actuality must be pointed to; its full quality is too concrete, even in ordinary cases, to be identified by mere universals or eternal objects. God, who knows or adequately experiences all creatures, must surpass us in perceiving as well as in thinking or knowing. Quality, value, must be perceived, intuited, or felt. It cannot be reduced to mere ideas, or eternal objects, or even non-eternal mere objects. Only subjects and their combinations or nexus are concrete.
The joke about the famous negative theology is that, since to go from most false to most true is an easy step, it cannot be true that there is epistemic security in mere negation. It must be at least as difficult to know what is most false as to know what is most true! To issue negative directives to God (no dependency of any kind, nothing contingent, no change of any sort), as theologians thought themselves modest, secure, and reverent in doing, is merely poor thinking. They were not secure or modest and what they did had little to do with reverence. Negation is parasitic on affirmation. We learn, not by effecting an initial act of wholesale negation, and then perhaps accumulating positive facts. We start with beliefs and supposed positive observations or truths. In all this Popper is the master. There is no other way to begin thinking than with something positive that is taken as known, at least roughly or with some probability. We purify initial affirmations by falsifications (in metaphysics the latter are logical not empirical).
The polarity necessary-contingent is one of a number of similarly abstract contrasts that can be used to distinguish God from what is not God. Other such contrasts are absolute and relative, infinite and finite, independent and dependent, even simple and complex. With each of these contrarieties, using combinatorial mathematics, a table can be constructed of the sixteen possible conceptual combinations, as affirmed or denied of God or World. I take this as a striking example of Peirce’s (also Whitehead’s) belief that all definite knowledge is mathematical, whether the mathematics is pure or applied. It may be extremely simple, as we are about to see. The traditions in their essential problems were no simpler, and the implied, but not explicated, mathematics was the one I have just sketched. Classical theism, Aristotelian theism, and classical pantheism (Stoics, Spinoza), violently oversimplified the issue and only appeared subtle and complicated because of their maze of ambiguities and maneuvers as they tried to hide basic absurdities or contradictions. We are all merely human and none of our capacities are infallible.
There is a possibility of ambiguity in the explication of World or cosmos as "what is not God." This is to be construed as not entailing that the divine actuality fails to include the cosmos. Inclusion is not identity. You or I in some sense include our bodies but to identify a person with that person’s body is reductive materialism. Hobbes may have been a theist who did this, but who else? I think theists should reject this identification. In addition, denying that the divine actuality includes the cosmos and yet saying that in God is something analogous to knowledge or love in us, and that divine knowledge or love is ideally adequate and all-embracing, is using words while abandoning any reasonable, even analogical, meanings for them. Knowledge of (love for) x, includes x. The reason many have not seen this is that our human knowledge (or love) is so mingled with defects and limitations that it may be better to say that it is closer to ignorance or guessing than to the full import of the word know (or love). One of the reasons for being a theist just is that we have to tame down many words in describing ourselves, since only God could fulfill the values the words tend to connote. We love, but how much of the import of that wonderful word do we actually achieve? With our best words, anthropology needs to be (partially) negative. Here too, however, extremes are wrong. Take "freedom": are we simply unfree and only God makes genuine choices among open alternatives? Is all our love merely self-love or self-interest? Certainly not. Negative absolutes are always suspect.
The polar contrast, necessary-contingent, is far from the only one that can be used to contrast God with what is not God. Others are: absolute-relative, infinite-finite, independent-dependent, simple-complex. God, for N.c, was form, pure actuality, pure spirit, without body, pure unity without plurality. With all such very abstract conceptual polarities, using combinatorial mathematics, there are 4 x 4 = 16 combinations of assertions about God, allowing for sheerly negative or zero applications.
In figure 1, column I has the superiority over column II because II makes God something that might not have existed, so that one must then ask, How does it happen that God does exist? The creator of all thus requires a supercreator, or mere groundless lucky chance. And to what does the divine happening happen? (My happening happened to my parents—and to many others.) Happenings, accidents, belong in time, not in pure eternity. I hold with Aristotle (and Plato as well, though less explicitly)—that to exist merely contingently is to have come to be. Aristotle: "With eternal things to be possible and to be are the same." The God of the high religions does not come to be, but always has been and always will be—without possible alternative of having not existed. Eternal here need not mean immutable, but must mean unborn and undying.
In none of my books, including this one so far, is my
most important original metaphysical discovery presented in its best
mathematical form, or as what Peirce called a diagram. (In an inelegant form it
is in CS.) The right formation (figure 1) is as given me by a dear
friend, a
The sixteen options become thirty-two if each is subdivided into those accepting and those not accepting Plato’s mind-body analogy for the relations between God and the cosmos.
Figure 1. The Sixteen Positive and Negative Options in Thought About God
(Hartshorne’s Model Somewhat Revised by Joseph Pickle)
It took more than fifty years to get this table right (with Joseph Pickle’s help—he, a theologian, was the neater mathematician).
Here are the principles represented by the dotted lines in some of their aspects.
First, III includes what is positive in I and II so far as deity is concerned. Second, 3 includes what is positive in 1 and 2 so far as world is concerned. Third, the diagonal from N.n to O.o includes the four cases in which a variable is used symmetrically as between God and World. This has the advantage that the ideas used to characterize deity can be given a basis in our experiences of the world, so that we need not appeal to mystical insight to give human meaning to our theism. Fourth, we can refute Aristotle’s and Carneades’s implicit objections to classical theism (before it existed) that it involves contradiction between categorial characterizations of deity and analogical ones, such as "living," "good," "beautiful," "happy," "spiritual," "rational or conscious," "loving," and the like. As Hume’s Cleanthes said, a God solely necessary, self-sufficient, independent, unmoved, infinite, mere cause and in no way effect, can have no positive value-qualities, no awareness or intelligence, however analogical. It is really a kind of atheism from a religious standpoint. This was Wolfson’s view also. To model a religious view of God on Aristotle was an unwitting but catastrophic blunder. How it could occur I am trying to partially explain in this essay.
An apparently conclusive objection to any symmetrical application of categories to God and World is that it nullifies, or at least complicates, their function of distinguishing God from God’s creation. I say, apparently conclusive because the objection presumes either that there is only one way in which something can be contingent or necessary (relative or absolute, finite or infinite), or both of these together, or else that no such way could surpass in value, transcend, any conceivable other. This is a nonneutral, question-begging assumption. Take "I am finite," and "God is finite"; does this combination make me equal to God? How am I finite? I am only a tiny fragment of the finite; God’s finitude is vast, indeed there may be a real temporal infinity of finitudes in God. Suppose the present cosmos is spatially finite. What am I in this vastness? Think of the galaxy or the island universes. God is nonfragmentary rather than nonfinite, but what CT (classical theist) ever made this manifestly justified distinction? It is as though these people had a phobia toward finitude and wanted to worship mere infinity instead of an all-surpassing and positively good actuality. Indeed what else was the case with Hinduism in the Advaita version? Or take the Thomist definition of God as actus purus, actuality without potentiality. The Hindus were more consistently negative when they said, For Brahman we are not there, the supreme reality is free not only from potentiality and change, but also from any knowledge of multiplicity or the temporal world, which is Maya, there "only for ignorance."
To the objection to potentiality in deity, the reply
is similar. Iff (logicians use this
word for if and only if) value in every essential dimension admits of an
absolute maximum of value, worth, or goodness, then indeed the
All-surpassing and by-conceivable-others-Unsurpassable must be incapable of
increase in value, and certainly incapable of decrease. (This was Plato’s
argument in the Republic, not, I think, later.) We know, since
Leibniz, that there are incompossible possibilities
of positive value; also that greatest possible multiplicity is a dubious
notion. We know too that beauty, aesthetic value, has a close relation to
variety and hence to multiplicity. Both White-head and Berdyaev argue that
tragedy is not simply evil instead of good, but rather mutually incompatible
goods that could not all be coactualized. Hence,
although God is never wicked in the ethical sense, and never chooses the lesser
general good instead of the greater, still God could not possibly have a most beautiful possible world to enjoy contemplating, and hence can increase in
value as new beauties are added to the cosmic treasures already achieved. I
distinguish two forms of perfection A and R, absolute and
relative. In whatever sense A is logically possible, God has A;
in the remaining (aesthetic) sense God has R. No matter what, God will enjoy
incomparably more of the cosmic beauty than anyone else ever could. The very
year I came to this view, a visiting Hindu scholar, Mukerji the sociologist (who also called himself a mystic), expressed a similar idea in
the
In many ways, some of them decisive, we are no longer in the thirteenth century philosophically, nor even in the eighteenth.
Let us return to the advantage that the distinction of N from n, and C from c, gives us. If there were no
illustration in the world for absoluteness, how would the idea of God as
absolute acquire human meaning? By sheer negation? Yes, said classical theists. God surpasses all possible others (the meaning of the word in the high
religions) by being in no way relative, dependent, effect, or
changeable. In the world, however, every cause is also effect, every dependence
is balanced by some form of independence. We depend on our ancestors for our
very existence, did they depend on us for theirs? If you say yes, then you are
begging answers to the following questions. Is the causal order of the world
symmetrically absolute, so that what happens in a given situation is the only
possible outcome of what went before, just as what went before was the only way
what happens next could have come about? In short, is there any freedom of
decision making in the creatures, or is the divine freedom the only genuine
freedom? Or, does even God act only by necessity? What is cognitively safe
about any of these negations? In ancient
In any case, classical theism, CT, was not consistently negative. Is cause merely negative, is dependence merely negative, is love or knowledge a mere negation? One has only to call their bluff to see how insecure classical theists were in their negativism. At their best these people did not quite believe what they were saying. They did want to think that we influence God, who cares about and cherishes all the creatures. In all the Western religions, mystics spoke for such truly positivistic affirmations.
The most negative and also most false view in the
table is ZZ.zz, or O.o. Ergo its complete opposite NC.cn is
the most true. Q.E.D., assuming the principles the three "lines"
represent, also assuming that we are discussing ‘God’ as a religious term, not
a mere visual mark without positive coherent interpretation. Apart from all
actual religions, the idea of "all-surpassing excellence" or
"eminence" might seem to lack relevance, were it not that, in fact,
when people try to dismiss the God of the high religions they tend to
substitute deities of low religions, or a virtual deification of humanity, or (Strawson) "The Universe." Were Lenin or Stalin
taken realistically as merely human in Soviet Russia? Was Sartre (definitely an
atheist) merely human for the disciples of Sartre who helped to ruin
In spite of the counterargument from the opposites, most true and most false, the maxim, avoid extremes, is in general sound; indirectly it supports NC.cn and invalidates N.c. Modal terms, and other extremely abstract contrasts, including infinite and finite, are only ambiguously evaluative. Simply denying finitude of God does not exalt deity; rather, it makes God less than the world, with the latter’s immense, and by us mostly unknown, treasures of beautiful finitudes. Sheer infinity all by itself is nothing recognizable as good or beautiful in any positive sense. "Formless, all lovely forms, thy loveliness declare," taken literally, is mere gibberish. If not taken literally, just how then? Such rhetorical flourishing with words is not using them to express definite thought. And how can the supreme idea we are to live and die by be so indefinite as all that?
The remarkable charm of the words I have called gibberish is partly explicable by the phonetic verbal music they constitute; the rhythm, the many (seven) repetitions of the soft letter l, the many nice vowel contrasts, the rhyming lovely-loveli, and the avoidance of harsh or hard consonants. Consider the following quatrains from one of Shakespeare’s wonderful sonnets:
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O how shall summer’s honey breath hold out
Against the wreckful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout
Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?
In this matchless genius’s hands phonetic aspects of words reinforce their metaphorical or literal meanings and associated visual imagery. Accented harsh, sharp, or hard sounds (t eight times; hard g twice; k or hard c four times). These fourteen accented consonantal sounds express the violence by which the seemingly strongest things are in the long run destroyed. And then consider the soft sounds in plea, flower and summer’s honey breath. Of course these soft musical things cannot endure either.
Religious music, verbal or instrumental, is fine, but it is not theology, philosophy, or science. And religion, to be fully relevant, must include all of these.
There is a special historical reason why classical theism had its long reign and could with impunity enforce its dicta by fire and sword, or instruments of torture. This was the bad luck that much of the mature thought of Plato was seriously distorted or simply hidden by his disciples and successors. I refer to Aristotle, Carneades, Philo, Plotinus, and various other "NeoPlatonists." People much more scholarly than I am have spelled out this story in recent times. The connotations of the word Platonism, as mostly used, are far from Plato’s mature thought. Richard McKeon, on his oral examination, was asked, "In what writing was Plato’s theory of ideas first expressed?" "In the fifth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics," was his reply. This was not just a joke and I do not take it as such. To approach Plato through Aristotle is the hard and inefficient way to understand Plato. Philo is in some ways better, but in others worse; ditto Plotinus. McKeon himself did not claim to be a Platonist, nor was he.
My approach to Plato, luckily for me, was through the
Americans Paul Shorey, Paul Elmer More, Ronald
Levinson (Shorey’s student and a close friend of
mine), also Burnet and Cornford of England. I also
read a French admirer of Plato (who was not deceived by and very critical of
Aristotle), and a German scholar in Plato; indeed I was exposed to the work of
two such scholars. In addition, I listened to a Chinese specialist in Aristotle
(Hung-hwan Chen) who studied nine years in
What was Plato’s mature view? First, that in the central and deep questions we cannot hope to capture the full truth in wholly precise and secure language, but second that we should not (with the Sophists) give in to mere skepticism, vagueness, or humanism (man as the measure of things). Third, philosophy is dialogue, requiring long, cooperative effort and maturity (so that we should not expect articulate wisdom from young persons). Women as well as men (here too Plato [and Socrates] surpassed Aristotle) can, in unusual cases, play their part in the process. The way to philosophic truth, to be expressed as definitely and precisely as we can, though never wholly securely so (for we are not God), is through mathematics, geometry in particular. We also need to be aware of our concrete human situation, between the other animals who lack Logos, language and the capacity for rational thought that goes with it, and divinity, which transcends language. Fourth, what we hope for is "something like the truth." We need also to balance rational thought with mythical intuitions. Experience is in essence other than mere intellection and involves feeling, love, friendship, hoping, fearing, desiring, goal seeking. Plato knew too that civilized humanity arose out of previous, uncivilized stages (Dombrowski).
For Plato the key to life and reality (Burnet) is not the famous ideas or forms, but the idea of soul or mind, with its processes of sensing, feeling, remembering, desiring, planning. However, we must also, Plato thought, admit a nonpsychical factor, for the psychical is where there is "self-motion," and in wholly inanimate nature there is (or then seemed to be) the inert, with no self-moving power at all. If this intrinsically inert "matter" moves then it is moved by push-pull from other bits of matter, and ultimately also by some psychical entities or individuals. Any talk about Platonism that simply omits the idea of psychical self-motion as source of all motion, is not about Plato at all, so far as I am concerned. See the Phaedrus, Timaeus, Sophist, and Laws, book 10.
Plato was the first great, and an enthusiastic, theologian. Why is God required? Because there are many souls, or individuals endowed with self-motion, and there are also inert things that by themselves would never move or change. How, Plato asks, out of multiple self-motions and inert bits of matter, can one get an ordered cosmos with overall meanings and purposes. Multiple decision making to Plato suggests hopeless conflict, and lack of order of intelligible cooperative goal-seeking. The solution, as he saw it, was in a supreme psyche. Was this an unmoved mover? Of course not. Psyche as such is at least self-changed not unchanged. Indirectly it is clear that Plato knew also that a soul is moved by others as well as by itself, for he says it cares about others, and this is why Plato speaks of two Gods (or aspects of God—Cornford), the demiurge or merely timeless God and the "God that was to be," the World Soul, whose body is the cosmos of all that is not the divine psyche, especially all the animals, including us, and the inert things as well. Plato’s God "cares" about creatures. In God is being and becoming.
The supreme soul, Plato says, is not only the cosmic orderer; it is the all-inclusive reality, for it is false that body completely includes and is more than soul. On the contrary, soul in principle includes body. This is explicitly affirmed. In this psychical inclusiveness Plato is right, both on his own grounds and (in a partly different way), on mine. The wholly inert cannot (this is a logical cannot) contain movement, and the wholly unfree cannot have any free constituents. In addition, in subject-object relations, subject includes its object so far as the subject’s awareness is of that object. To deny that x is a constituent of awareness-of-x is an outright contradiction. Not that Plato ever wrote what I have just written. It is only one of the things he needed to write to complete his picture.
The truth is that Plato, being human, had some blind spots or arbitrary biases. His ambitious theocentric cosmology had a number of loose ends or ambiguities. That it was not adequately understood or at all fully accepted by his contemporaries and successors is easy enough to explain. His cosmology involved the puzzle of the two Gods, one creative of the other; the mysterious cosmic "receptacle," single subject of all the huge number of ever-changing predicates, a strongly monistic aspect of the system, which (Chen) Aristotle pluralized in his multiplicity of quasi-independent substances—a partial improvement and partial regression that left a trail of echoes in a long future; the indigestible mix of inert chunks of matter included in self-moving psyches; also the form of the Good, a principle of value consisting of an "absolute" beauty, of which all concrete goods or beauties were but defective copies or shadows thrown in a cave lighted from outside. Sometimes it seemed that the Good was almost a God beyond God, like the sun radiating light and warmth to everything else, a Being beyond beings. Finally also there was the rather ungreek ("Barbaric"—Thomas Altizer) notion of a vast plurality of immortal souls capable of successive reincarnations. With such unfinished business in itself, Platonism had to face a threat from the Stoic notion of a completely necessitarian cosmos with purely "rational" causation by a supreme Psyche in which there were no distinct self-moving psyches, each with its own freedom genuinely able to conflict with the self-movements of others. It was a cosmos in which what happened was always the only thing that then and there could have happened—all was, in advance or eternally, determined. Virtue consisted in resignation, not in choices among truly open possibilities.
Is it any wonder, then, that Carneades, leader of the third Academy, became a deeply skeptical opponent of Stoicism, a probabilistic empiricist and nothing more? Remember, too, that in that society simply no one really knew anything specific about nature’s microstructure, which is where, universally, much of the basic action is—nothing of cells, molecules, atoms, and mostly invisible radiation waves!
No aspect of contemporary philosophizing astonishes me
more than the apparent failure to realize, and act upon, the radically new
opportunities for metaphysical problem solving presented by the fact that
the said microstructure is now no longer totally hidden or at best only vaguely
or arbitrarily guessed at but is, in magnificent abundance, specified for us by
the sciences. Of course there are new unsolved problems, but they are on
different levels than the old ones. I select one aspect of the change showing
how the improvement is not a mere matter of degree. Where in current physics is
there an in-itself simply inert matter? Of course, nowhere! Epicurus guessed
rightly here but could not convince the Aristotelians or so-called Platonists.
Atoms are self-moving and may be psyches! The opaque dualism of Plato,
Aristotle, and Descartes is needless from now on! Leibniz was the first to see
this sharply. Insofar he was more truly Platonic than Plato (or anyone) could
be in ancient
With Peirce and Maxwell, science and philosophy began to change again a low for bits of contingency seeping into the world every moment, and on all cosmic levels of individuation. With Planck, Heisenberg, Whitehead, and others we can begin to have a more complete Platonism. The time is at last ripe for Plato to get a fair hearing! We can now stand on his shoulders and in certain ways also on those of Aristotle, Epicurus, Anselm, Leibniz, Peirce, Bergson, Whitehead, yes and Popper. Kant comes in only if we rid ourselves of the idea that he disposed of Hume and the other pre-Kantians mentioned above. Against every one of these, Kant was partly wrong. We cannot go back to him or reverse the movement from his climate of opinion to ours. We need a New Enlightenment as, according to Whitehead, we need a New Reformation.
As some of my readers will probably know, Whitehead emphatically rejects Plato’s doctrine that the cosmos is the divine body. However, the reason he gives for this rejection is a weak historical argument from the use made of the doctrine by the Neo-Platonists and Gnostics. Here Whitehead fell into the trap already occupied by so many others. It was Whitehead "nodding," with Homer. Oddly enough, my earliest clear recollection of encountering the divine-body idea in a modem is of a disciple of Freud, a German psychiatrist with whom I briefly discussed a psychosomatic difficulty of mine. He said, As our brain cells are to our experiences, so (analogically) are we to God (or to divine experiences). I told him this was also my idea. Whitehead should, in his philosophy of religion, have reminded himself of his own statement that his philosophy was a "cell theory" of reality and applied it as the psychiatrist did. The latter, I think, did not refer to Plato, but Whitehead should have, in just this context. To streamline his scheme, cells were what Plato needed—and did not have.
We now have that the lack of which wreaked havoc in the philosophico-theological traditions of the Western world for two thousand years. Is that not long enough?
I wish to end more positively. The almost deadly serious poet, Longfellow, reminds me of Wordsworth in his apparent lack of humor, but like Wordsworth, he could be profound. In one of his poems ("The Builders") he writes as follows:
All are architects of fate,
Working in these walls of time:
Some with massive deed and great,
Some with ornaments of rhyme.
[omitting a quatrain I consider foolish]
For the structure that we raise,
Time is with materials filled;
Our todays and yesterdays
Are the blocks with which we build.
I consider the poet in these last two lines to come close to sound philosophizing. What the present has from the past is the experiences of the past as still intuited, experienced in the present. Note that the poet talks of days, not weeks, months, or years. Many philosophers make the mistake of discussing the fallibility of memory after a long time. These are the complex hard cases, exactly the wrong ones with which to begin theorizing. The poet is thinking minutes and hours, todays as well as yesterdays. Philosophers should emphasize seconds and minutes. Information theories tell us that we get new bits of information several times per second. Birds, with higher bodily temperatures and shorter brain pathways, live faster than we do. Each day our conscious awareness forgets vastly more than it remembers. Then there are dreams. Bergson wrote the best essay on dreams since Aristotle and much more factually accurate than Aristotle. I have verified what he says many times with my own dreams. The learned world has paid little attention to this achievement of the great Jewish-French thinker. This is not untypical of that world. The territorial function of highly developed bird song was discovered and cogently argued for several times before much notice was taken of this. Finally an entire book by Eliot Howard with "Territory" the first word in the book title settled that issue for nearly everyone in ornithology and influenced people studying animal singing in general.
The function of the brain (Bergson again) is not primarily to make remembering, that is, experiencing the past, possible, but to prevent excessive and inopportune remembering from interfering with appropriate responses to the very near past and almost present possible. Causality, as David Hume and the overestimated Kant alike failed to realize, in principle just is memory. I learned from the great Anglo-American, Whitehead, that mentality, in its nonhuman forms, including the human form as an extremely special case, needs no explanation. Mentality is all we know, the rest is mere verbiage. White-head’s concept of prehension, or that which perception and what we ordinarily call memory have in common, interprets all experience as of the past, not the absolute present. To explain mentality, a positive power, by an in principle mindless matter is upside-down thinking. The old Buddhist phrase mind-only is an early version of this truth. In the West, Plato came the closest to it with his doctrine of mind as self-activity and the cause of all activity or change. Aristotle missed it and the West allowed Aristotle to dominate in theology, precisely where he was at his weakest, with his unmoved, timeless mover.
Another mistake was absolutizing genetic identity, thus starkly contradicting the lack of any sense of community or sympathy and inviting us all to give in to the excessive individualism of our Western societies. Whitehead expressed this when he said, "I sometimes think that all modern immorality comes from the Aristotelian doctrine of substance." In fairness it is Leibniz, not Aristotle, who absolutized personal identity. Aristotle’s admission of accidental predates the successive stages of the idea that substance qualifies the identity. But Aristotle made far too little of the interdependence of persons, and Peirce’s extreme continuity-ism or synechism made his theory of successive actualities, experiences, too indefinite to be of much use. His "infinitesimal" present experiences, with an infinite number of successive ones in a finite time, however short, blurs everything. So often a great discovery is partly spoiled in some such way. (Aristotle also and Bergson had no definite present experiences. On this issue, von Wright and Whitehead, with their temporal finitizing of experiences, seem unusual in the West.)
As I like to say, we all make mistakes. We are neither A-perfect nor R-perfect. However, we do not all make the same mistakes. (Only some Hindus accept the saying, "That art thou.") Let us do the best we can with our agreements and disagreements. Posterity may do better still. We should not be intimidated by pronouncements of the demise of metaphysics or the lack of progress in it. I offer this essay as proof to the contrary.
(from The Zero Fallacy and Other Essays in Neoclassical Theism, pp. 79-93)
Appendix B: copied from http://www.ctr4process.org/about/process/Synopsis.shtml.
a synopsis of process
thought...
by Sheela Pawar
Process thought is based on the philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (1861 - 1947). Whitehead departed from traditional philosophy by conceiving of individual entities as series of moments of experience instead of as masses of static substance. Within each moment, an entity is influenced by others, creates its own identity and propels itself into further experiences. Because of the involvement of all moments of experience with each other, Whitehead conceived of the entire cosmos as an organic whole. Just as all the cells in our bodies are interrelated, all elements of the universe -- from the light waves of a distant star to a human being living in Boise, Idaho -- are interrelated. These relationships are not all equal: a single skin cell on a person's toe does not affect his or her life as much as does a nerve cell in the brain. Complex groups of cells, such as the nervous system, have a greater influence on the person than single cells. Analogously, social groups are more effective than single individuals, and individuals are more effective than single cells. People living in the United States are affected by particles released from a volcano in the Philippines. Business practices in Japan affect the global community. Individual elements that have little effect in themselves, such as a molecule of carbon monoxide, are often greatly effective in large numbers, as ecological effects of large amounts of carbon monoxide pollution attest. Relativity is descriptive of sub-atomic particles, social groups, as well as planetary systems.
Whitehead's philosophy is grand in scope. It provides a metaphysical system applicable to all aspects of our lives. It has been utilized to provide insights into aesthetics, biology, economics, education, interpersonal relations, physics, physiology, political theory, psychology, the relationship among the world's religions, and theology. As a comprehensive metaphysical system, process thought is intrinsically trans-disciplinary.
American philosopher Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) developed and systematized Whitehead's way of thinking about the Divine. Just as the systems of the human body are guided by the human mind, Hartshorne conceived of the Divine as the guiding principle of the cosmos. Thus, the cosmos is the very body of the Divine. As the human mind is something more than the human body, the Divine is not simply equal to the sum of the ingredients of the universe. God is affected by the elements of the universe, living the joys and sorrows of every created entity, yet God is not overcome by this multitude of feeling. God's vision of the perfection of the creative universe functions as an eternal vision of hope. God gently persuades all entities towards this perfection by providing each of them with a glimpse of the divine vision of a better future. And yet all entities retain the freedom to depart from that vision.
Process thought, then, offers a vision of hope. As a relational rather than mechanistic cosmology, process thought addresses questions of social, political, economic, and ecological justice. Process thinkers work toward changing harmful and restrictive social structures to reflect the interrelational reality. Process thought advocates personal, global, and environmental responsibility; community-based economics; participatory, grassroots democracy; an end to patriarchal structures; respect for gender, ethnic, cultural, and racial diversity; non-violence; and ecological and economic sustainability.