1019. When Hartshorne talks about . . .

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When Hartshorne talks about the "personal element" that stubbornly persists notwithstanding philosophy's aspiration to "impersonal truth"; or when he speaks of "intuitions" being "the nonlogical side of awareness," which is also needed, along with "technical logic," to establish a metaphysics (CSPM: xiv, xvii f.), he seems to me to be recognizing, in his way, the difference between the two levels of living understandingly—the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis and the secondary level of critical reflection.

It seems clear enough that there may very well be certain "central intuitive convictions" back of one's acceptance or rejection of philosophical doctrines (xviii). But if the philosopher shares philosophy's aspiration to "impersonal truth," and if "it is a philosopher's business above all to warn against bad or insufficient arguments or unjustified restrictions upon ways of interpreting the world" (xvi), clearly, the philosopher is bound to test her or his "intuitive convictions" by "philosophical doctrines," or, at least, by the arguments for them, and not simply follow the reverse procedure of testing "philosophical doctrines," or arguments, by her or his "intuitive convictions." Put differently, since our intuitions "at least as put into words and conceptualized, are not infallible or invariable from person to person," the philosopher must "hold [her-or] himself open to and cordially invite criticism, above all, by making as clear as possible what it is that [she or] he believes" (xviii).

In short: Hartshorne allows for, even if he hardly adequately explicates, a position according to which philosophy is not simply "faith seeking understanding," but critical reflection on faith, or, better perhaps, on the primary verbalizations and conceptualizations of faith, directed toward attaining an "impersonal truth" that faith as such, or, better, faith as verbalized and conceptualized, still may not have laid hold of.