The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

scanned pdf

Hartshorne's claim that we have "a direct experience of God" turns out to be the claim that "[w]e know, as primitively as we know anything, that we are part, not the whole, of what is, and in this knowledge is involved the awareness of the whole as such, not in its details distinctly seen, but in its generic character." Or, again, his claim that we directly experience God turns out to be the claim that "[t]he sense of being coordinate to others, the sense of coexistence (something of which is directly given in the intuition of space or extension) is as primitive as life itself, and only within a common impartial unity can such coordination obtain. . . . [I]t must be a unity inclusive of values as such, if it is to explain coexistence. Values distributed among persons can be compared and considered as coexistent only if there is a value measuring and including them" ("The Formal Validity and Real Significance of the Ontological Argument": 235 f.).

Hartshorne's move from what we in fact do experience—a whole, of which we are but part, an inclusive value including and coordinating all other values, a living [?] universe (cf. 236)—to "God" is clearly too hasty, and so unwarranted, even if one allows that the whole, the inclusive value, the living universe, may indeed by symbolized as "God," i.e., as "an inclusive person, whose impartial inclusiveness is precisely the omniscience and all-appreciativeness of God," and so on. In point of fact, even the characterization of the universe as "living" and of all beings as having life is but a particular symbolization of what we, in fact, experience—namely, ourselves as concretes coordinate with others as concretes all included in an inclusive concrete!

That this experience, which we do indeed have, may be symbolized in the theistic terms in which Hartshorne chooses to symbolize it in no way warrants his claim that "analysis" of our experience "reveals God as its intelligible content" (cf. "Mysticism and Rationalistic Metaphysics": 467, where he says that "we directly experience space as ourselves and other things or creatures coexistent with us. . . . [D]eity as the inclusive, ordering, and definitive unity of coexisting things is the full reality [sic!] of what is directly given as spatiality"). "Analysis" of our experience, properly so-called, reveals inclusive concreteness as its intelligible content, while "God" is yielded as the content of our experience, not by "analysis," but by the very different process of "generalization" (cf., e.g., Hartshorne's statement that "there is some cumulative support, in the history of Western philosophy, for belief in the ultimacy of a sufficiently generalized [sic!] idea of sympathy or love" [Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: 377 f.]).

12 October 1996

  • No labels