1015. Hartshorne speaks in different contexts . . .

scanned pdf

Hartshorne speaks in different contexts in which he is arguing for psychicalism, not of the impossibility of conceiving the concrete otherwise than as psychical, but of the impossibility of imagining it otherwise.

Thus, e.g., he says: "Things either intrinsically refer to, 'take account of,' other things, for example, past events, or they internally contain no such reference to other things. . . . If there is such reference, then it is at least as if the thing perceived or remembered or felt the other. For 'taking account of' is the external or spectator's indication of what internally to the thing itself can only be imagined [sic] as perception or feeling or memory" (RSP: 78).

Or, again, he says: "Physics does, to be sure, need the notion of physical reality, reality with spatiotemporal characters, and this notion [we may accept] along with science and common sense. But since . . . experiences as such have spatiotemporal character, and since no unmistakable samples of concrete actuality other than experiences are directly given or positively imaginable [sic] as actualities (with quality as well as relational structure, causal connectedness, intrinsic becoming, etc.), it is . . . meaningless to say that besides experiences there are also the merely physical realities. Experiences are physical realities, and our only way of positively generalizing [sic] the notion of 'real,' or 'physical actuality,' beyond the specific traits of human experiences as sample realities, is to generalize the notion of experience itself so as to enable it to include a vast and indeed infinite range of possible types of nonhuman experience, not forgetting divine experience. If this cannot be done, then we are incurably ignorant of what can be meant by 'real' or 'process' in general, as we must certainly be of any positive characters distinguishing the parts of nature to which we deny the characters of experience" (WP: 18).

Finally, I can refer to a somewhat different kind of passage in which Hartshorne uses the same language. "The nontheist at his heart," he says, "loves his fellows for themselves, for what they are. The theist in no sense lacks this ground for love. But the theist has a positive imagination [sic] of what it means to say, 'what [women and] men are.' He envisages no mere neutral 'truth' as containing all lives and all values, but an all-perceptive, all-participating living receptacle of reality and value. How can this belief make one love creatures the less—the belief that they are integral to the supreme creation, the divine life as newly enriched each moment by the lives of all?" (LP: 258).

That theistic religion provides a "positive imagination" of what human beings really are is clear enough; and I have just as little difficulty understanding that a psychicalist metaphysics is the only way whereby one can "positively imagine" (or "generalize" to) what concrete actualities other than human experiences really are and, in that sense, know them. But imagination is one thing, conception, something else; and if what I can conceive is such that it can be conceived only as existent, I can very well know what it is and that it is without having any "positive imagination" of it. The idea of a universal and, therefore, all-inclusive individual can be conceived, if at all, only as existent, since the possibility of nonexistence is contradictory of universal and, therefore, all-inclusive individuality. Consequently, unless the idea of such individuality is, in some way, incoherent or hopelessly unclear and, therefore, inconceivable, I have a positive conception of such an individual and I know that such an individual exists. But whether, or in what sense, I can also be said to know that this individual itself knows, is conscious, etc., etc. is another and independent question. My submission is that thinking and speaking of it in such a way is, really, having a "positive imagination" of it, the proper function of which is not so much cognitive or intellectual as existential, in that it is directed toward facilitating a certain self-understanding and life-praxis in relation to others and the whole, as distinct from making possible a proper knowledge of it. In other words, this "positive imagination" of the whole functions to communicate the meaning of the whole for us, as distinct from communicating its structure in itself.

That I cannot imagine the whole positively and adequately except in terms of theism or psychicalism may well be true. But why should metaphysics properly so-called be only, or even primarily, a matter of imagining, as distinct from conceiving?