894. It has become increasingly clear to me . . .

scanned pdf

It has become increasingly clear to me that Hartshorne's psychicalism and Post's physicalism are formally very much alike. Each, in its way, is an essay in—o use Post's term—"nonreductive metaphysics." Although both are substantively pluralistic, both are also attributively monistic, Post's being an attempt at a metaphysics, as I've put it, "within the limits of physics alone," Hartshorne's, an attempt at a metaphysics, as it were, "within the limits of psychics alone" (cf. Hartshorne's "Physics and Psychics: The Place of Mind in Nature"). Accordingly, both of them bear the burden of arguing that their respective positions are not reductive—in Post's case, by seeking to show that his physicalism in no way reduces everything to what can be thought and spoken of in the terms of mathematical physics; in Hartshorne's case, by seeking to show that his psychicalism neither holds that "everything is psychic" nor is vulnerable to the objection of being excessively anthropomorphic.

For all of their formal similarity, however, the two positions are also strikingly different in their respective understandings of metaphysics. For Post, metaphysics simply is physics insofar as it is employed for the purposes of unifying all discursive and nondiscursive ways of understanding and transforming the actual world. For Hartshorne, on the other hand, metaphysics is not at all identical with any special science, however employed, including psychics, because metaphysics' concern is not merely with the actual world but with all possible worlds, or better, all possible kinds of world. In other words, whereas, in Post's view, metaphysical statements, as much as those of physics or any other special science, are logically contingent, in Hartshorne's view, they are logically necessary, and so different in type from any scientific statement. Still another way of saying this is that metaphysical statements, for Post, are factual statements subject to factual falsification, while for Hartshorne, they are nonfactual statements that cannot be falsified factually, but only logically, by showing that they could not be true.

In one important respect, then, Post's physicalism is the more consistent and coherent of the two projects. If I am right, however, it necessarily implies something like my broadly transcendental metaphysics, which requires to be made explicit if its own most fundamental presuppositions and implications are to be accounted for. So in this other important respect, the neoclassical transcendental metaphysics that Hartshorne works out in developing his psychicalism is the more satisfying of the two projects.

Moreover, from a theological standpoint such as mine, Post's position proves to be anything but nonreductive in "changing the subject" from the talk about God that faith necessarily presupposes and implies to the only "God talk" allowed for by its thoroughgoing contingentism or empiricism. On the other hand, Hartshorne's failure to see that the "God talk" proper to an austerely transcendental metaphysics of possible kinds of world is importantly different from that proper to either religion or philosophy not only leaves metaphysics in an important respect unrevised, but also needlessly encumbers a theology that would be credible as well as appropriate in our situation today.

23 July 2008