1012. In one and the same essay . . .

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In one and the same essay, Hartshorne can take two contradictory positions on the scope of our immediate experience of, or direct acquaintance with, reality. Thus he can say in one sentence, "Memory in the generalized sense, common to personal and impersonal memory, is the whole of our direct acquaintance with reality." In another sentence, however, he can say, "In experience it is memory [sc. personal memory], perception [sc. impersonal memory], and goal seeking that tie events together" ("The Organism according to Process Philosophy": 143, 151 cf. CIAP: 201). Clearly, if the first sentence were correct, the second could only be false—and vice versa. Since Hartshorne is elsewhere clear that we have a direct acquaintance with, or experience of, the future no less than the past, it is evidently the second sentence that more adequately expresses what he means to say. The interesting question, then, is why he is led to say what he says in the first.

In other places, he can say, "the past only is prehended" ("Analysis and Cultural Lag in Philosophy": 109). Or, "no unit-actuality prehends itself. (Nor does it prehend its contemporaries.) It prehends only its predecessors" ("Preface" [to writings in process philosophy, ed. by P. Gunther]: 5).

In other places, Hartshorne judges Whitehead to have been right "in denying that any direct data of experience are simultaneous with the experience for which they are data, or by which they are prehended" ("Mysticism and Rationalistic Metaphysics": 465). But not to be simultaneous with is one thing, to be only in the past of, something else. To be in the future of is also not to be simultaneous with. This is not to imply that I agree with Hartshorne's judgment about Whitehead. In fact, it seems clear to me that Whitehead does not deny what Hartshorne says he denies. That there is no experience that is not the experience of data given to the experience as independent of it need not mean, and perhaps cannot mean, that experience is always and of necessity experience only of such data. Whitehead seems to say quite clearly that the occasion of experience which originates by experiencing the past alive in itself terminates by experiencing itself [sic] as alive in the future.

As for the question of why Hartshorne says what he says in the first formulation, the following statement may be indicative: "all awareness of actualities is mnemonic" ("The Individual Is a Society": 76). I.e., the suppressed assumption of Hartshorne's statement is that what is experienced, or is the object of awareness, is "actualities." Taking this assumption into account, one can say that he is indeed correct, since the only actualities there are to experience belong to the past.

Hartshorne says: "The latest self does not make itself object, but it will be object for subsequent selves" ("Mind as Memory and Creative Love": 444). But, then, in other places he can speak of "the ultimate sociality" as the fact that "the present, which enjoys contributions from past experience, feels or regards itself [sic] as a contribution offered to the future as such" (ClAP: 153). The contradiction seems clear, unless, again, the present's "feeling" [sic], or "regarding" itself is to be distinguished as in principle different from making itself object in the sense in which it will be object for future selves.