922. Always we and other animals . . .

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"Always we and other animals enjoy or suffer the world; how far we and they also think the world is more variable. (Only a few animal species do much thinking.)" ("In Defense of Wordsworth's View of Nature": 84)

"[M]ind [is] primarily feeling rather than thought or consciousness. To feel, it is not necessary to know that one feels, to pass judgment on the feelings, or to classify or otherwise symbolize them" ("The Individual Is a Society": 73).

Reading passages such as this, I'm struck that, while Hartshorne can explain the difference between "feeling" and "thinking," and thus between our distinctively (adult) human way of experiencing, on the one hand, and that of nonhuman animals (as well as human infants), on the other—namely, as lying in "our symbolic power"—he cannot, or, at any rate, does not, do very much to further explain the difference between animate experience generally and lower, inanimate levels of experience. In fact, he hardly does anything at all beyond invoking his distinction between "an active singular" and "an aggregate of singulars" ("Physics and Psychics": 95). (His distinction between having and not having a central nervous system pertains solely to "animate experience" in his broad sense of the term to include individual cells as animals.)

26 April 2005