By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
What is my real issue with Hartshorne and Whitehead?
One way of formulating my issue is this: How are we to understand and practice both metaphysics and philosophy -- in their difference as well as their relatedness?
Whereas Hartshorne and Whitehead, in their different ways, tend to assimilate metaphysics to philosophy, I, in my way, insist on their difference -- arguing that metaphysics is austerely scient or intellectual, while philosophy, by contrast, is eminently sapient or existential, notwithstanding that, in its first, analytic phase, which culminates in metaphysics, philosophy certainly is intellectual.
Instead of saying that Hartshorne and Whitehead tend to assimilate metaphysics to philosophy, I could say that they tend to assign to metaphysics tasks or functions that, in my view, are more properly said to be philosophical. A good example of this is Hartshorne's argument that, once religion has developed to the point where myth has been demythologized, metaphysics becomes indispensable. I should maintain, rather, that what demythologizing makes indispensable is not only, or even primarily, metaphysics, but rather philosophy, as including but also going beyond metaphysics, strictly and properly so-called.
21 July 2008
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