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The Darkness and the Light: A Philosopher Reflects Upon His Fortunate Career and Those Who Made It Possible
In this book Charles Hartshorne continues his contribution to the field with autobiographical reflections, showing the causal conditions which made his career possible.
"There is some advantage in associating philosophical beliefs with specific life situations. The reader will find suggestions for a philosophy of life and of religion. The religion is not the orthodox Protestant Christianity which I grew up in, although it is closely related, but also includes Judaism, Buddhism, and some forms of Hinduism. It will in some ways be found close to the beliefs of C.S. Peirce and also those of A.N. Whitehead. Of the persons, famous or not famous, that I have known, I recall many things that seem worth making available to others, sometimes witty remarks, expressions of outstanding goodness, remarkable wisdom, or ludicrous foolishness. In such ways the book is a celebration of life in its variety, depths, and heights." — Charles Hartshorne
"There is some advantage in associating philosophical beliefs with specific life situations. The reader will find suggestions for a philosophy of life and of religion. The religion is not the orthodox Protestant Christianity which I grew up in, although it is closely related, but also includes Judaism, Buddhism, and some forms of Hinduism. It will in some ways be found close to the beliefs of C.S. Peirce and also those of A.N. Whitehead. Of the persons, famous or not famous, that I have known, I recall many things that seem worth making available to others, sometimes witty remarks, expressions of outstanding goodness, remarkable wisdom, or ludicrous foolishness. In such ways the book is a celebration of life in its variety, depths, and heights." — Charles Hartshorne
- GenresPhilosophy
426 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
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July 9, 2024
A BOOK THAT IS “BOTH LESS AND MORE THAN AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY”
Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) was an American philosopher who taught philosophy at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and lastly the University of Texas. He is perhaps best remembered for his development of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into a form of theology.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1990 book, “This is both less and more than an autobiography. It is only very roughly chronological and chiefly a mixture of memories of people with reflections on these memories. Or, it is an exercise in philosophical reliving of some personal relationships or encounters in my past… Although I have written many books and a great many essays, there are topics, nevertheless, about which I wish to go on record here in a manner not appropriate to these other writings… The reader will find, here and there in this book, suggestions for a philosophy of life and a philosophy of religion. The religion will not be identifiable as simply one or another of the competing orthodoxies or classical religious views: but it will have recognizable relations to several of them, including Judaism, Buddhism, and some forms of Hinduism. No doubt my Episcopalian upbringing will have left its impress. The philosophy … will have analogies to beliefs of … Charles S. Peirce… Henri Bergson, and … Alfred North Whitehead… it will be somewhat in harmony with the views of … [Ilya] Prigogene, and … Sewall Wright.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)
He adds, “The reader should bear in mind that, except for the Epilogue, nearly all of this book was written when I was eleven or more years younger than when the book (I trust) will have been published… All of the book represent maturity…. As reflecting upon life as a whole. It seems doubtful if there has ever been a philosopher as chronologically old who had engaged in written and spoken dialogue with as many other philosophers of as many countries and cultures. I attribute this to modern medicine and hygiene…” (Pg. xv)
He recalls, “My first book got perhaps less notice at the time than David Hume’s, which, according to him, was a catastrophic failure. And I believe that, as Hume’s first book deserved more notice than it got, so did mine. But I was stimulated by the lack of much acclaim to try harder and explore other fields of thought.” (Pg. 18)
He says of Bertrand Russell, he comments, “Did I like him? I cannot give a simple answer. He was witty, of course a great logician, and an almost unbelievably gifted and versatile person. Moreover, there was a noble passion for justice and freedom. And yet, in his last years, this passion was tarnished, it seems to me, by an element of personal resentment for the way certain Americans in official positions had treated him… Nor did I sense much warmth in the man. Or much humor, as distinct from wit.” (Pg. 22-23)
He states, “What is philosophy? … Philosophy is the attempt to achieve forms of valuation, or principles of valuing, that are as little as possible arbitrary, self-serving, individually or collectively, and as little merely regional or provincial. They should not unduly exalt even our own animal species rather than the other forms of life on high levels; that is, mammals, especially primates or whales or dolphins. Our view should be at least planetary and admit some intrinsic value.” (Pg. 26-27)
He explains, “If I have been a feminist for over sixty years this is not particularly surprising. I had admirable, educated female cousins, aunts, mother’s helpers, and so on. Women as I knew them were manifestly capable… How often since I have wondered at the need so many of my sex seem to feel to exalt their half of the species by underestimating the other half… Modern hygiene, making a far lower birth rate desirable or even necessary, opens up new possibilities---at long last.” (Pg. 62-63)
He admits, “I seem always to have been something of an elitist with a sense of noblesse oblige, even though our family home was an ordinary church rectory, and I attended public school until the age of fourteen. Being one of six children of an Episcopalian minister was a shelter from the world of democratic leveling downward in taste that is a danger of our American version of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. Going to an Episcopal school continued and intensified this sheltered existence. And there was no radio or TV to break into it.” (Pg. 69-70)
He observes, “Another point I have retained from [his philosophy teacher] Rufus [Jones] is his relativizing of the distinction between mystics and ordinary people. Being directly aware of God or not aware of God is a matter of degree and clarity, rather than an absolute yes or no… For God is by essence ubiquitous and cannot be absent from anything, including any experience, if he (or she) is present anywhere. The theistic question is partly one of self-knowledge. Either no one is aware of God and the idea is baseless… or everyone is aware of God…” (Pg. 121)
He recalls, “Then came our entry into [World War I]. I had given up isolationism and a temporary fascination with sheer pacifism and was not surprised or shocked… some person or persons came to the college and made an appeal for volunteers to serve in the army medical corps… By volunteering for medical military service a young man insured himself against being conscripted for one of the fighting branches of the service… this was not ‘heroic’… But neither was it a calculated move to escape danger.” (Pg. 124)
In the medical corps, he once explained to a peer, “human motivation is in principle neither self-interested nor altruistic … but is in principle the interest of the self as at the given moment in selves as at other moments. I now care for me tomorrow, or I care for you tomorrow, the common element is the interest of life in other life, temporarily at least DISTINCT from the life taking on the interest. Later I learned from Buddhists and certain Western philosophers to emphasize still more the plurality of selves involved even in self-interest.” (Pg. 142)
He continues, “It was about this time that I thought out answers to two questions: the relation of mind to matter, and the relation of individuals to one another. The first answer came to me as an intuitive datum… that the physical world is directly GIVEN entirely in emotion terms… the world is first felt and only afterwards thought. Sensation is through and through emotional… On the question of the relations of individuals, I… finally almost reached the Buddhist-Whiteheadian view I now hold, which is that both self-identity and nonidentity between persons are relative rather than absolute.” (Pg. 148)
While a student at Harvard, ”I did know definitely … how and why I must differ from the extremes of monistic and deterministic theories, and also from extreme pluralism. The dissertation I was writing that year argued for a middle position between mere monism and mere pluralism, or between a doctrine of all internal and one of all external relations… Whitehead began… to present such a middle position… In some respects his doctrine was much more finely articulated than mine, and immensely beneficial for my further development. The same would be said for the metaphysics of Peirce, which also... was a similarly median position on the question of the one and the many… Whitehead had a more fully founded and thought-through system; but Peirce had analytic tools that have great power in clarifying issues.” (Pg. 166-167)
He acknowledges, “the trouble is that a purely philosophical religion has serious limitations. There have to be symbols, including sacred writings as symbols. And we have to maintain continuity with the past, with tradition, while remaining free to grow… I may have been unbalanced on the rationalistic side. But we have to follow our intuitions, with whatever precautions and attempts at self-criticism. In fact, I do not now believe in the God of the Bible. I should do so if I could forget the Bible. Yet without the biblical religion I was brought up on, who knows that I should have come to believe?” (Pg. 210)
He notes, “In my philosophy, chance, or luck (good or bad), is a perfectly real aspect of life, not to be explained away by any idea either of providence or of causal determinism…. To be born of intelligent and unselfish parents is the first does of good luck; to stupid or selfish ones, of bad luck… Although there is no such thing as an unlucky (or lucky) individual if this is taken to mean that ALL the chances have been unfavorable (or all favorable)… still, the ratio of good and bad turns of fortune can vary significantly. As a mostly lucky individual I do not forger that this has merely happened … and that many others have been mostly unlucky.” (Pg. 260)
He argues, “Science tries to ascertain the limits of decision-making, not to set out the decisions before they are made. And this applies even to atoms, not just to the higher animals. Only the limits within which there are decisions grow narrower as one goes down the scale of creatures. This, I hold, is the significance of the new physics of statistical rather than individually determinative laws… nature is a hierarchy of freedoms, and all law and order is a PARTIAL aspect of becoming, the other aspect of which is creative decision, adding to the definiteness not just of knowledge but of reality. Our unpredictability is analogous, on a vastly higher level, to that of particles, not a mere consequence of it. I acquired this view almost simultaneously from Peirce and Whitehead over fifty years ago and have argued for it ever since.” (Pg. 305)
He recounts, “Bertrand Russell came to Harvard while Whitehead was professor of philosophy there and lectured on theory of value. Whitehead introduced him as follows: ‘Bertie says that I am muddle-headed. But I think that he is simple-minded.’ Here, in unsurpassably succinct form, is one of the great contrasts between philosophers. There are those who would be clear… at almost any cost, including that of vastly oversimplifying things. There are those who above all would be adequate to the richness and man-sidedness of reality, even if they cannot always be neat and clear in their account of it… Whitehead told me that he considered Russell ‘the most gifted Englishman alive.’ He added two criticisms: ‘He does not appreciate the importance of tradition, and he won’t qualify.’ Here again is the charge of oversimplification.” (Pg. 311) He adds, “The wonder is not that they drifted apart, but that they held together long enough to finish their great joint work.” (Pg. 313)
He acknowledges, “my philosophy is mostly a minority position. Few accept my view that the existence of God is either logically impossible or logically necessary, so that empirical evidence could no more count against theism than it could count against ‘2 plus 2 equals 5.’… I am not in a minority in holding a realistic view of experience, in asserting that in experience something independently real is given. Here I am a common-sense philosopher. However, I may be in a minority … in generalizing this realistic view of experience to cover even dreams…. I am also not in a minority in rejecting reductive materialism, but only in rejecting dualism.” (Pg. 362)
He states, “God (unlike any human lover) loves us adequately, is above jealousy, envy, or malice, will not MISUNDERSTAND us in any way. And God will ALWAYS BE THERE with undiminished wisdom and appreciation. No human person, no earthly species, can be known to provide this ideal spiritual support. Indeed, we reasonably know that only God could do this.” (Pg. 398)
He concludes, “With my seventy years of mentally alert adult experience in knowing and reading philosophers and scientists, I have at least reflected a great many and some very bright candles… I think my final word must be to acknowledge the debt I feel to the human and cosmic context from which I have received so much more than some others have, and my wish that even at this late time in my life I could to more to repay the debt.” (Pg. 402)
This book will be “must reading” for those seriously studying Hartshorne’s philosophy, and of keen interest to those interested in Process Philosophy/Theology, etc.
Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) was an American philosopher who taught philosophy at the University of Chicago, Emory University, and lastly the University of Texas. He is perhaps best remembered for his development of Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into a form of theology.
He wrote in the Preface of this 1990 book, “This is both less and more than an autobiography. It is only very roughly chronological and chiefly a mixture of memories of people with reflections on these memories. Or, it is an exercise in philosophical reliving of some personal relationships or encounters in my past… Although I have written many books and a great many essays, there are topics, nevertheless, about which I wish to go on record here in a manner not appropriate to these other writings… The reader will find, here and there in this book, suggestions for a philosophy of life and a philosophy of religion. The religion will not be identifiable as simply one or another of the competing orthodoxies or classical religious views: but it will have recognizable relations to several of them, including Judaism, Buddhism, and some forms of Hinduism. No doubt my Episcopalian upbringing will have left its impress. The philosophy … will have analogies to beliefs of … Charles S. Peirce… Henri Bergson, and … Alfred North Whitehead… it will be somewhat in harmony with the views of … [Ilya] Prigogene, and … Sewall Wright.” (Pg. xiii-xiv)
He adds, “The reader should bear in mind that, except for the Epilogue, nearly all of this book was written when I was eleven or more years younger than when the book (I trust) will have been published… All of the book represent maturity…. As reflecting upon life as a whole. It seems doubtful if there has ever been a philosopher as chronologically old who had engaged in written and spoken dialogue with as many other philosophers of as many countries and cultures. I attribute this to modern medicine and hygiene…” (Pg. xv)
He recalls, “My first book got perhaps less notice at the time than David Hume’s, which, according to him, was a catastrophic failure. And I believe that, as Hume’s first book deserved more notice than it got, so did mine. But I was stimulated by the lack of much acclaim to try harder and explore other fields of thought.” (Pg. 18)
He says of Bertrand Russell, he comments, “Did I like him? I cannot give a simple answer. He was witty, of course a great logician, and an almost unbelievably gifted and versatile person. Moreover, there was a noble passion for justice and freedom. And yet, in his last years, this passion was tarnished, it seems to me, by an element of personal resentment for the way certain Americans in official positions had treated him… Nor did I sense much warmth in the man. Or much humor, as distinct from wit.” (Pg. 22-23)
He states, “What is philosophy? … Philosophy is the attempt to achieve forms of valuation, or principles of valuing, that are as little as possible arbitrary, self-serving, individually or collectively, and as little merely regional or provincial. They should not unduly exalt even our own animal species rather than the other forms of life on high levels; that is, mammals, especially primates or whales or dolphins. Our view should be at least planetary and admit some intrinsic value.” (Pg. 26-27)
He explains, “If I have been a feminist for over sixty years this is not particularly surprising. I had admirable, educated female cousins, aunts, mother’s helpers, and so on. Women as I knew them were manifestly capable… How often since I have wondered at the need so many of my sex seem to feel to exalt their half of the species by underestimating the other half… Modern hygiene, making a far lower birth rate desirable or even necessary, opens up new possibilities---at long last.” (Pg. 62-63)
He admits, “I seem always to have been something of an elitist with a sense of noblesse oblige, even though our family home was an ordinary church rectory, and I attended public school until the age of fourteen. Being one of six children of an Episcopalian minister was a shelter from the world of democratic leveling downward in taste that is a danger of our American version of the Anglo-Saxon heritage. Going to an Episcopal school continued and intensified this sheltered existence. And there was no radio or TV to break into it.” (Pg. 69-70)
He observes, “Another point I have retained from [his philosophy teacher] Rufus [Jones] is his relativizing of the distinction between mystics and ordinary people. Being directly aware of God or not aware of God is a matter of degree and clarity, rather than an absolute yes or no… For God is by essence ubiquitous and cannot be absent from anything, including any experience, if he (or she) is present anywhere. The theistic question is partly one of self-knowledge. Either no one is aware of God and the idea is baseless… or everyone is aware of God…” (Pg. 121)
He recalls, “Then came our entry into [World War I]. I had given up isolationism and a temporary fascination with sheer pacifism and was not surprised or shocked… some person or persons came to the college and made an appeal for volunteers to serve in the army medical corps… By volunteering for medical military service a young man insured himself against being conscripted for one of the fighting branches of the service… this was not ‘heroic’… But neither was it a calculated move to escape danger.” (Pg. 124)
In the medical corps, he once explained to a peer, “human motivation is in principle neither self-interested nor altruistic … but is in principle the interest of the self as at the given moment in selves as at other moments. I now care for me tomorrow, or I care for you tomorrow, the common element is the interest of life in other life, temporarily at least DISTINCT from the life taking on the interest. Later I learned from Buddhists and certain Western philosophers to emphasize still more the plurality of selves involved even in self-interest.” (Pg. 142)
He continues, “It was about this time that I thought out answers to two questions: the relation of mind to matter, and the relation of individuals to one another. The first answer came to me as an intuitive datum… that the physical world is directly GIVEN entirely in emotion terms… the world is first felt and only afterwards thought. Sensation is through and through emotional… On the question of the relations of individuals, I… finally almost reached the Buddhist-Whiteheadian view I now hold, which is that both self-identity and nonidentity between persons are relative rather than absolute.” (Pg. 148)
While a student at Harvard, ”I did know definitely … how and why I must differ from the extremes of monistic and deterministic theories, and also from extreme pluralism. The dissertation I was writing that year argued for a middle position between mere monism and mere pluralism, or between a doctrine of all internal and one of all external relations… Whitehead began… to present such a middle position… In some respects his doctrine was much more finely articulated than mine, and immensely beneficial for my further development. The same would be said for the metaphysics of Peirce, which also... was a similarly median position on the question of the one and the many… Whitehead had a more fully founded and thought-through system; but Peirce had analytic tools that have great power in clarifying issues.” (Pg. 166-167)
He acknowledges, “the trouble is that a purely philosophical religion has serious limitations. There have to be symbols, including sacred writings as symbols. And we have to maintain continuity with the past, with tradition, while remaining free to grow… I may have been unbalanced on the rationalistic side. But we have to follow our intuitions, with whatever precautions and attempts at self-criticism. In fact, I do not now believe in the God of the Bible. I should do so if I could forget the Bible. Yet without the biblical religion I was brought up on, who knows that I should have come to believe?” (Pg. 210)
He notes, “In my philosophy, chance, or luck (good or bad), is a perfectly real aspect of life, not to be explained away by any idea either of providence or of causal determinism…. To be born of intelligent and unselfish parents is the first does of good luck; to stupid or selfish ones, of bad luck… Although there is no such thing as an unlucky (or lucky) individual if this is taken to mean that ALL the chances have been unfavorable (or all favorable)… still, the ratio of good and bad turns of fortune can vary significantly. As a mostly lucky individual I do not forger that this has merely happened … and that many others have been mostly unlucky.” (Pg. 260)
He argues, “Science tries to ascertain the limits of decision-making, not to set out the decisions before they are made. And this applies even to atoms, not just to the higher animals. Only the limits within which there are decisions grow narrower as one goes down the scale of creatures. This, I hold, is the significance of the new physics of statistical rather than individually determinative laws… nature is a hierarchy of freedoms, and all law and order is a PARTIAL aspect of becoming, the other aspect of which is creative decision, adding to the definiteness not just of knowledge but of reality. Our unpredictability is analogous, on a vastly higher level, to that of particles, not a mere consequence of it. I acquired this view almost simultaneously from Peirce and Whitehead over fifty years ago and have argued for it ever since.” (Pg. 305)
He recounts, “Bertrand Russell came to Harvard while Whitehead was professor of philosophy there and lectured on theory of value. Whitehead introduced him as follows: ‘Bertie says that I am muddle-headed. But I think that he is simple-minded.’ Here, in unsurpassably succinct form, is one of the great contrasts between philosophers. There are those who would be clear… at almost any cost, including that of vastly oversimplifying things. There are those who above all would be adequate to the richness and man-sidedness of reality, even if they cannot always be neat and clear in their account of it… Whitehead told me that he considered Russell ‘the most gifted Englishman alive.’ He added two criticisms: ‘He does not appreciate the importance of tradition, and he won’t qualify.’ Here again is the charge of oversimplification.” (Pg. 311) He adds, “The wonder is not that they drifted apart, but that they held together long enough to finish their great joint work.” (Pg. 313)
He acknowledges, “my philosophy is mostly a minority position. Few accept my view that the existence of God is either logically impossible or logically necessary, so that empirical evidence could no more count against theism than it could count against ‘2 plus 2 equals 5.’… I am not in a minority in holding a realistic view of experience, in asserting that in experience something independently real is given. Here I am a common-sense philosopher. However, I may be in a minority … in generalizing this realistic view of experience to cover even dreams…. I am also not in a minority in rejecting reductive materialism, but only in rejecting dualism.” (Pg. 362)
He states, “God (unlike any human lover) loves us adequately, is above jealousy, envy, or malice, will not MISUNDERSTAND us in any way. And God will ALWAYS BE THERE with undiminished wisdom and appreciation. No human person, no earthly species, can be known to provide this ideal spiritual support. Indeed, we reasonably know that only God could do this.” (Pg. 398)
He concludes, “With my seventy years of mentally alert adult experience in knowing and reading philosophers and scientists, I have at least reflected a great many and some very bright candles… I think my final word must be to acknowledge the debt I feel to the human and cosmic context from which I have received so much more than some others have, and my wish that even at this late time in my life I could to more to repay the debt.” (Pg. 402)
This book will be “must reading” for those seriously studying Hartshorne’s philosophy, and of keen interest to those interested in Process Philosophy/Theology, etc.
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