913. Hartshorne is clearly not above . . .

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Hartshorne is clearly not above asking rhetorical questions in place of giving reasons.

Thus he asks in one place, for example, "[H]ow can the thing known become a constituent of experience—which, according to Royce's self-observation (and mine), is a unity of feeling, purpose, valuation, meaning—unless the thing has some feeling, purpose, valuation, meaning, of its own to contribute?" (Creativity in American Philosophy: 69).

That X cannot become constitutive of an experience unless it has something to contribute to that experience, which as received can only be somehow included in the unity of feeling, purpose, and so on, that the experience is—all this my self-observation, also, confirms. But the conclusion that X must therefore itself be an experience, as distinct from constituting or contributing to it follows if, and only if, the question is begged -- in just the way Hartshorne begs it by his rhetorical question.

My guess is that just such begging of the question is also what's going on when he professes to experience his perception of his own body as itself an experience of so many subhuman experiences, in accordance with Whitehead's formula, "feeling of feeling."

20 December 2005