1451. Logical Types (II)

SCANNED PDF: PART 2

19. "Modal all-inclusiveness" (ANTOT: 38) means “all actuality in one individual actuality, and all possibility in one individual potentiality or capacity for actuality" (79). But, then, one need not employ the psychological term "know" as Hartshorne does in arguing that the divine nonexistence is impossible. Clearly, if there is any sense in which God can be said to know, God's knowledge as God's knowledge must be “omniscient,” or "modally-all-inclusive," actually knowing all actual things as actual and all potential things as potential. But, be this as it may, modal all-inclusiveness suffices to exclude the possibility of God's nonexistence, because all- inclusive possibility could not include the possibility of its own nonexistence, and so, if it could not exist, it would not be all-inclusive after all.

20. Suppose that “mere matter must mean the zero case of mind, that is, of sentience, memory, and the rest" (LP: 123). Why need, or could, it mean the zero case of relativity, that is, of inclusiveness, internal relatedness, and the rest? And why need, or could, it mean "the zero of the presence or manifestation of God," provided by “God" is meant "universal relatedness," all-inclusiveness," "internal relatedness," etc.?

21. Hartshorne's conclusion that "mind as such" is "the universal correlate of quality, and of quantity as well” is scarcely warranted by his claim, however valid, that "any quality, to be known, must become a quality of experience in some form" (LP: 124). The only conclusion he seems entitled to draw is that mind as such is the universal correlate of quality, and of quantity as well, as known. But who would dispute this? On the other hand, who can get out of it what Hartshorne tries to get? The fact, even if it be a fact, that mind as subject is, indeed, the universal correlate of quality, is entirely compatible with mind as object being "a mere species of quality," give or take on the question-begging epithet.

22. Hartshorne's claim that "an infinity of forms of conceivable feeling might be absent, and yet feeling might be present" (LP: 125) evidently presupposes that "feeling" is a proper analogical concept. But how does, or could, Hartshorne establish this? Of course, if feeling is a proper analogical concept, what he says is correct. But what entitles anyone to suppose that it is true? That an infinity of forms of conceivable internal relatedness might be present seems clear enough. But feeling—unless of course "feeling" is simply a word for such relatedness?

23. Hartshorne's objections to the retort, that “no criterion could tell us that the atom does feel" (LP: 126 f.) can all be met: (1) Granted that only "unlimited mind" could detect the faintest traces of mind, the question is precisely whether either unlimited (superior) or radically limited (inferior) mind can be asserted.  (2) That the most vivid experiences are, indeed, not of "an insentient something," if that means of a mere term, rather than the subject of relations by which as subject it is qualitatively modified and complicated, does not go to show that they have "feeling" as their object, unless the question of the scope of feeling is begged. (3) God could love something without detecting the least traces of feeling, provided the proposition, "To feel is to be related,” is not convertible—which, again, is just the question.

24. To Hartshorne's rhetorical question, "at what point does the refusal to generalize concepts 'rashly' or beyond good sense become merely the inability or refusal to generalize—period?" I answer, obviously not the point beyond which no further predictive power is achieved, but the point beyond which nothing is or could be known to be added to what can already be said without the generalizations—either in concepts that are already utterly general or by means of other concepts used symbolically or metaphorically (LP: 128).

25. If, as Hartshorne holds, "metaphysics is essentially a question of the logical structure of concepts" (LP: 11), then metaphysics cannot be "essentially,” but only inessentially a question of analogy! For, analogy is not itself a question of logical structure, but simply presupposes this question. But with what consistency, then, can Hartshorne say, e.g., that “ontology [by which he clearly means nothing other than "metaphysics in the classical sense" (LP: 30)] . . is idealistic (in the panpsychic or realistic form) or nothing" (RSP: 84)?  Clearly, allowing that idealism in the relevant sense is analogical, one could say this only by rejecting Hartshorne's statement that metaphysics is essentially a question of logical structure as at best incomplete and misleading, requiring revision so as to read, "metaphysics is essentially two questions: of the logical structure of fundamental concepts and of the development of metaphysical analogies for expressing what these concepts apply to. See Hartshorne's statement that "the basic decisions are not as to metaphors, but as to logical structure. What depends upon what, what includes what, what is necessary to or contingent upon what?" (CSPM: 129).

26. Hartshorne can sometimes appear to reduce the concept "God" to nothing but an "analogy," or analogical concept (LP: 100 f.), as though there were not, or could not be, a purely formal, strictly literal concept of God explicative of the logical structure implied by the analogical concept. If to say things “in terms of God, instead of reality, does not change the formal pattern, but it relates the pattern to experience by a certain analogy,” then either “God" is without any meaning with respect to formal pattern, or "reality" is so used that the formal pattern to which it refers already implies what "God" makes explicit.

27. Re: LP: 100 f.—Hartshorne's argument here is scarcely convincing. To say that "human love is a particular form" is already to beg the question if it is thereby assumed that "the manner in which it figures as base of our analogy is logically non-restrictive, even though in psychological probability (in the way our imagination works) some restrictiveness may be more or less inevitable." As the distinction he here tries to make between "conceiving” and "imagining," together with the standard concession that "in psychological probability . . . some restrictiveness may be more or less inevitable," only too clearly reveals, he is here assuming the traditional distinction between res significata (with respect to which "love" figures in the analogy as "logically non-restrictive") and modus significandi (with respect to which "some restrictiveness may be more or less inevitable.”  But the question, of course, is how Hartshorne knows, or could know, that this distinction applies to the term "love." Of course, if "love" expresses a proper analogy, what he says is true. But the question is precisely whether "love" does, or can, express such an analogy, and Hartshorne doesn't answer this question but merely begs it—by asserting "flatly" that "human love is a particular form"!  Moreover, how does, or could, Hartshorne distinguish what he means by “love” in saying that “the manner in which it figures as the base of our analogy is logically non-restrictive” from “relativity,” “internal relatedness”? When “whatever is special or odd about human love,” or, more generally, about creaturely love is abstracted from, what is left except "relativity” as a transcendental?  Thus, for all Hartshorne shows, as distinct from merely asserting, “to say that love must be limited in flexibility" is not “merely one of the many ways in which the positivistic alternative to theism may be put" (LP: 101). For, however limited the flexibility of love may be, there need be no limit set to the flexibility of "relativity,” because, "relativity to all” is and must be no less meaningful than “relativity to some" and “relativity to none.”

28. Why the “speculative” in “speculative philosophy," which Hartshorne takes as synonymous with "metaphysics” (“a general speculative philosophy or metaphysics” [LP: xiii]), as well as identifies as his own “cause" (“the cause of speculative philosophy” [LP: 10])? Presumably, if philosophy essentially involves generalization, in the sense of refining and extending the "ordinary meanings” of terms (as Hartshorne insists it does—in e.g., LP: 219, RSP: 85), there's nothing else for it to be except "speculative. " But what if metaphysics is conceived in the way Hartshorne conceives it when he says that it is “essentially a question of the logical structure of concepts,” of so analyzing the concepts and propositions of ordinary experience as to explicate their transcendental implications? Wherein need there be anything “speculative” about this? Note how Hartshorne contrasts “'methodological materialism' (better, 'physicalism')" with “the speculative psychicalism which alone can escape dualism without denial of any given aspects of reality" (CSPM: 54).

29. "Even analogical affirmations should commit one to something" (LP: 37). But to what? I submit: to the logic or logical structure of the concepts involved in the affirmations, in the sense of the "rules" or "laws" explicative of the meaning of these concepts. Thus, to say that God could have created a world other than any world he does create is to imply that there are unactualized potentialities in God, that God is not actus purus—or conversely. Is, or could, Hartshorne be committed to anything than this?

30. Hartshorne reasons that the classification of certain "descriptions" of God, besides "obviously formal" and "obviously material" ideas about God, "depends partly upon one's philosophical beliefs" (LP: l39). How so? If you are a panpsychist, "psychical concepts are categorial, universal in scope," so that "to say God has awareness, feeling, memory, sympathy" is not to make the "material statement" it may seem to be, but, rather, to make an "analogical" statement. On the contrary, if you do not hold panpsychist philosophical beliefs, to say this is to make a material statement, on all fours with "obviously material” statements, “for . . . some rather than all creatures have these [sc. psychical] qualities.” But why “depends partly”?  Because, "even assuming panpsychism, the most general psychical terms, though universally applicable to concrete singulars . . .

are not purely formal in the same sense as the other categorial terms." But, surely, the sophisticated panpsychist is well aware of this? In reality, then, the classification of analogical "descriptions" of deity depends wholly upon one’s philosophical beliefs! The obvious question, then, is as to the justification of these beliefs. What warrants panpsychism, not relatively to other equally "speculative,” or "gnostic," options such as "dualism" and "materialism" (= materialistic monism), but absolutely, i.e., as the claim that “psychical concepts are categorial, universal in scope," in the sense that they are "universally applicable to concrete singulars"?

31. Why is there a “set of concepts often applied to God which are distinct both from very specific terms like 'shepherd ' and very abstract terms like 'relative'”?  Because "there is a legitimate broadest possible meaning of psychical terms [sc. like 'knowledge,’ 'will,' 'love'] which is applicable to all individuals whatever, from atoms to deity" (CSPM: 154). Thus they are distinct from "very specific terms like 'shepherd,'" on the one hand, which apply only to "quite specific sorts of things, definite items found here and there in existence" (152), and from "very abstract terms like 'relative,'” on the other, because of the "still wider applicability, or greater abstractness, of the strictly categorial notions [sc. like 'relative ' or 'finite ']," whose meaning "does not vary from one level to another in the scale of beings" (154). But what if one allows as how "relative" has a different sense, which can be specified "quite literally," depending on whether it is understood to apply to individuals, or events, on the one hand, or to groups of individuals and abstractions, on the other? Are terms like “knowledge,” “will," "1ove," when used in their "legitimate broadest possible meaning," distinct from terms like "relative," when used with reference to concrete singulars (as distinct from abstractions and groups)?  If they are still distinct, wherein does their distinctiveness lie, and how can one know them to be thus distinctive?

32. When Hartshorne says that there is a third group of "'problematic' terms, which may be literal if or insofar as we have religious intuition, like 'know' or 'love"' (CSPM: 155), he clearly misleads and is misled. For, by his own account, such terms cannot possibly be "literal" in the same sense in which he has hitherto used the word, whatever their derivation—and yet he fails to explain any other sense in which he is using the word. They cannot possibly be literal, because, while “to be 'constituted in some way by contingent relations' is simply and literally that, no more, no less, and no other," “to 'know,' to 'feel,' to 'remember'—here there are qualitative differences which are not easily covered by empty terms like 'way' or 'degree'” (154). God ob-viously does not know as a man knows, any more than a dog knows as man knows. But, then, to say that “God knows" cannot be to make a literal statement, in the sense in which “God is relative" is a literal statement. Nor can it be literal even when "relative" is understood to mean "relative in the way or to the degree in which the universal individual alone can be relative," because even then there remain the "qualitative differences" between God's knowing and our own or a dog's. Consequently, if there is any sense in which these "problematic” terms can be said to apply literally to God, it is the "strange sense" of which Hartshorne speaks in the parallel passage in LP: 141. What sense is that? It is in the sense established traditionally by distinguishing between the res significata of such terms, with respect to which the prime analogate is God, and their modus significandi with respect to which the prime analogate is the creature. If by the "literal" sense of a term one means not the sense that it always has whatever it is applied to, but, rather, its relatively primary sense as distinct from its relatively secondary sense when it is applied to different things in different senses, this traditional distinction between the different respects in which the primary sense of a term can be specified relative to its secondary sense allows one to speak of its sense as applied to God with respect to the thing it signifies as its literal sense. But all this, as applied to a given term, begs the question. Nor can Hartshorne's appeal to “some dim but direct awareness of deity" in any way answer the question he begs. If  “know” or "love” are indeed “analogical” concepts, in that they are neither "unambiguously literal" nor "unambiguously nonliteral," what Hartshorne says about them would indeed be true. But neither he nor anyone else is in a position to know whether they, in fact, are analogical. "Direct awareness of deity" notwithstanding, Hartshorne is committed to an understanding of metaphysical formulations according to which "formulation, verbalization, is an art, and a fallible one whose success is a matter of more or less… 'a priori,' or 'innate,' is one thing, and 'certainly known' is quite another" (CSPM: 31 f.). Keeping this in mind, one can very well agree that "there is no simple inaccessibility of God" and even that we also use our awareness of God “to furnish a criterion for the weakness of man."  But this is no reason to suppose that “human knowledge" is anything other or more than a "mere symbol," as distinct from what Hartshorne means by an analogical concept (156).

33. Hartshorne speaks of "[the] logic of metaphysical conceptions" in apposition with "rules of the game of talking metaphysics" (LP: 158).

33a. Isn't it true that any psychical term used with anything other than its "legitimate broadest possible meaning" could only be used symbolically not analogically, if applied to God?

33b. "The many become one, and are increased by one. . . . Also there are two senses of the one—namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many .... We are, each of us, one among others; and all of us are embraced in the unity of the whole….”

34. Under what conditions can a metaphysician rightly use the term "God"?  (This is not quite the same question as, under what conditions can a philosopher use this term. For, while philosophy necessarily includes, or implies metaphysics, philosophy is also more than metaphysics—and that in a variety of respects, one of the chief of which is its being sapientia rather than scientia.) I answer: the metaphysician can rightly use the term “God,” whether to assert or to deny its application, only insofar as it stands for the sort of rules definitive of "the unsurpassable individual,” itself understood as expressing the logical status of the object of theistic faith intended by the theistic religious use of “God." This answer presupposes that "metaphysics is essentially a question of the logical structure of concepts” (LP: 11). But this means that, as true as it may be that for theistic religions, “'God ' stands for experience in its absolutely flexible form" (LP: 100), there is no need for the metaphysician so to use the term, since his or her interest qua metaphysician is in the logical structure of the concept of “experience in its absolutely flexible form." Thus he or she will be concerned to explicate this logical structure with purely formal concepts such as "relativity," "contingency,” “absoluteness," “necessity,” “concreteness," "abstractness," "actuality,” "possibility," "individual,” “event,” "all," "some," "none," etc.  In other words, if "religious language is full of implications of interaction between God and his creatures" (ANTOT: 69), the metaphysician has the right to use the terms constituting this language insofar as he so uses them as to express these implications as to logical structure, as distinct from whatever else the terms may happen to express.

35. Hartshorne says apparently contradictory things about the relative scope of psychical terms. Thus, e.g., he can say "The animal feels both itself and God ... and thinks neither; we feel and can think both" (DR: 40). On the other hand, he can speak as though animals, too, both feel and can think, however differently from human beings. "Certainly birds do not think or feel just as men do, still less, by all analogy, frogs or amoebae, a fortiori, not [sic] molecules. But that they neither think nor feel in any way whatever, complex or simple—what intellectual content does this have?" (LP: 125).  Elsewhere Hartshorne often speaks of "the privileges of consciousness” ("Man's Fragmentariness": 6), or of "our human prerogative of conscious participation in the creative process," which belongs uniquely to us among the creatures on this earth (LP: 321 f.). But does the concept of "unconscious (or nonconscious) thinking" make any clear sense? If not, then the statement that frogs, amoebae, molecules think in no way whatever has all the "intellectual content" Hartshorne himself gives it by making consciousness uniquely and distinctively human (cf. CSPM: 94 f.) where he contrasts "sub-linguistic [or animal] life" with "super-linguistic or divine life," respectively below and above "the middle ground of language [or rationality, or symbolic power, primarily speech] which generates metaphysical error." In both cases, below and above, "there can only be metaphysical truth, on the one hand expressed in mere action and feeling, on the other in super-linguistic consciousness." "Language," he says, "is our means of transcending the merely pragmatic or emotional sanity of the other animals and achieving a status between it and the fully conscious divine sanity" (cf. also LP: 297).

36. Hartshorne speaks of "self-activity" and of things as "self-actively synthesizing the data furnished them by their pasts" (LP: 312).

37. Significantly, Hartshorne insists that "in any case it is not feasible to love not only one's human neighbors, but all creatures, 'as oneself.'  One must make a distinction between fellow human beings and mere fellow creatures.... the first requisite [is] to have a criterion for 'human.” What is this criterion?...Apart from the mere test of successful interbreeding, the multiform use of tools, above all, of that kind of tool known as a symbol, is the dividing line between Homo sapiens and all surviving animal forms” (LP: 319). On the matter of love being differential, Hartshorne says "by definition, to 'love' is to care about differences, and to respond to them differentially. Otherwise love would indeed be 'blind ' in the most absolute sense” (LP: 36).

38. Hartshorne flat-out contradicts himself when he says, on the one hand, that "sensitivity has degrees and levels, necessary existence does not," from which it follows that "in necessity we are all pure ciphers," while "in sensitive responsiveness to the experiences of others, we cannot be ciphers," etc.; and, on the other, "if God is all in all, in some sense everything, we must be something of this everything, not bare nothing. We have no divine attribute in its fullness or infinity, but yet we are not zero in comparison to any attribute" (LP: 323, 147).

39. If science is concerned with "physical structure," viewing all things as "physical systems" in terms of “behavior" (LP: 309), why can't one say that metaphysics is concerned with "logical structure" (in the broad sense in which logic includes a completely general theory of the concrete as such and a completely general theory of experience, knowing, or awareness as such (AD: 44), viewing all things as "logical systems" in terms of “the rules governing the meaning of the terms" properly applied to them (AD: 65)?  Granted that “the human self is a singular entity with real unity, a unity which is known to us by immediate feeling." Granted, further, that the human self is “the model, the only one available, for an idea of the singular reality as such,” because "it is not the function or within the capacity of external perception to tell us what things are, but only where they (and especially, where groups of them) are, in how small or large an area, and how they are changing their relative position." Granted, in short, that "if we wish to know what the things thus distributed in the spatial system may be, we must supplement external perception by that which alone remains, internal perception, self-perception, intuitive grasp of the unitary nature of our experience," because "we do know to some extent what and not merely where and when, this experience is.”  But why, having granted all this, need one further grant that, although "we cannot directly apply our internal experience to the characterization of things in general,” still we can and "must generalize, extend into an infinitely flexible analogy, the basic traits thus accessible to us” ("Panpsychism" [140]: 454 f.)? Why not say, rather, that the thing the metaphysician as such does with our internal experience is to discern its logical structure, not by generalizing the basic traits it discloses, but by analyzing the rules explicative of the meaning of terms expressing such traits, or, in other words, by the general philosophical method of analyzing presuppositions? Thus if the metaphysician as such says "what things are," he or she does so exclusively in terms of logical structure, not in terms of analogy, although in the one case as in the other “the human self…is for us the only distinctly intuited singular" (446). In this sense, one can reject Hartshorne's claim that "to form even a vague conception of the singulars composing these collectives [sc. which are all we ever apprehend in perceiving the non-human world] our only resource [or, rather, recourse!] is to generalize analogically the epochal and atomic characters of human experiences" (450). Moreover, analogy can never be "our only resource" if it is a resource at all, because unless a non-analogical account of what things are were possible, there could be no reason to suppose that even an analogical account were possible! —Consider a parallel argument: "Influence is either taken as an arbitrary 'constant conjunction,' or else as memory; there is no additional possibility that has been made at all clear" ("Mind as Memory and Creative Love": 451). On the contrary, there is the additional possibility of taking influence as the internal relatedness of present to past whereby the past modifies and complicates the present.

40. Hartshorne has the most disconcerting way of not using psychical terms with any notable consistency. This is particularly glaring in the essay, "Mind as Memory and Creative Love." Consider, e.g., what he there says about love. On the one hand, "love" is said to be, if generalized, "any more-or-less sympathetic valuation" (441). Valuation of what? Of the objects provided by "awareness," which is to say "memory and perception," or, defining perception as "impersonal memory," one can say, simply, by "memory," understanding thereby, in the most general sense, "the way in which the past is possessed by present experience and thereby colors and influences that experience" (451). Thus "the mental or psychical functions are almost [sic] summed up in memory and love" (441). "Memory and perception...both give us materials for more or less sympathetic evaluation" (441); "sympathetic evaluation" is distinguished from "sympathetic valuation" as "the more conscious"; cf. also 451). On the other hand, Hartshorne speaks of his as "the theory of mind as love or participation" (455). and, in this vein, says that “minding is remembering and anticipating, and both are forms of love, one for the past actual, the other for the future possible experiences and their immanent subjects (which are the experiences as one, and as self-active)"(449).  Here memory is not a form of awareness whereby love as sympathetic valuation/evaluation alone can receive its "objects" or "materials." Rather, memory is a form of love, now understood as "participation" in the past, or “sympathy" with it, just as anticipation is the form of love involving participation in, or sympathy with, the future (cf. 463: "Memory is always a form of participation or sympathy.” Evidently “participation” and “sympathy” are synonyms for "love.”)  In this connection the task of valuation/evaluation appears to be assigned to "thinking,” instead of to love, as when Hartshorne says "what we call thinking is the fashion in which human beings tend to carry out their evaluations. The higher animals evaluate, but without thinking, at least in our human sense of the manipulation of words and other symbols” (442; cf. 457).  He also makes clear that "our cells or other constituents...must have primitive sympathetic valuations of our thoughts and feelings” (452).

41. I should say that the issue is not whether “the additional concepts of psychics" (in the sense of the large class of concepts excluded from the physicist’s explanations") ultimately are relevant to the whole of nature. The issue, rather, is how they are relevant. Are they relevant, as Hartshorne assumes, only, or primarily, insofar as we conceive “the 'additional' factors (over and above mere behavior)" in “their fully generalized variables," i.e., insofar as we "generalize such ideas as feeling, perceiving, remembering, anticipating, intending, liking, and disliking, so that they can apply not only to animals, but even to the real individual constituents of the vegetable and mineral portions of nature"?  Or are they relevant, as I maintain, primarily, if not only (so far as metaphysics is concerned), insofar as we so analyze such psychical "factors,” "ideas," or “concepts” as to explicate their transcendental implications, the strictly necessary conditions of the possibility of applying such ideas or concepts to anything whatever? Taking “ourselves as samples of natural fact," and the only samples of reality to which we have "a dual access," the metaphysician undertakes by the method of the analysis of presuppositions (concepts and principles [ = rules]) to explicate the logical structure of concrete singular entity as experienced in our internal, nonsensuous experience of our own existence, which is to say, of ourselves, others, and the whole.

42. According to Hartshorne, "God has such attributes as unsurpassable wisdom and goodness" as "necessary properties." Why? Because "God must, by religious definition, be worshipful; and an ignoramus or one who deals with others maliciously is not worshipful." Thus "God is essentially worshipful, exalted above possible rivalry in knowledge, power, and goodness" ("Religious Aspects of Necessity and Contingency”: 150, 152). But, significantly, Hartshorne says earlier in the same essay, that "Necessity, infallibility, unsurpassability, all the religiously essential divine attributes, in principle evade empirical treatment" (148). Now from "worshipful" to “necessary,” "infallible," "unsurpassable" is evidently one move, requiring nothing but an analysis of "worship.”  But to "unsurpassable wisdom and goodness [and power]" is just as evidently yet another move, requiring more than an analysis of "unsurpassability,” etc. Of course, God cannot be unsurpassable and an ignoramus or one who deals with others malevolently, since ignorance and wickedness are possible traits only of the surpassable, implying fragmentary, partially exclusive, and, therefore, contingent existence. But to know that God cannot possibly be ignorant is not to know that God is necessarily omniscient, or "exalted above all possible rivalry in knowledge,” unless one knows that "knowledge” can in some sense be meaningfully applied to God. Assuming that the metaphysician as such is concerned with “man’s vision of God" only in order to explicate "the logic of theism," what the metaphysician as such must regard as "necessary properties" are the rules definitive of “the unsurpassable individual,” or "modal all-inclusiveness" (ANTOT: 64, 38). To understand these rules is also to understand why any assertion or implication that God is ignorant or wicked cannot be appropriately made and why any assertion or implication that God is knowing or good can be appropriately made—and that regardless of whether such an assertion or implication is a proper analogy or, as I contend, merely a metaphor or symbol.

43. Is it really true that "what we love in others is above all their own form of love," in loving which "we are relativized both to them and to those they love” ("Whitehead in French Perspective": 580)? I see no reason to think so, although it does seem to me reasonable to speak of love as, above all, of the “concrete and singular, not abstract, general, or collective” (RSP: 100).

44. Surely, if one can agree, as Hartshorne does with Ryle, that the bodily processes we directly feel or intuit are not "seen," because "seen" means “observed thanks to one's eyes reacting to light coming from the object said to be seen” ("Mind and Matter in Ryle, Ayer, and C. 1. Lewis”: 21), one can hardly disagree with the proposition that “social” is similarly misused when one says that “the subject-object relation is basically a subject-subject relation," and so "a 'social’ relation” (15). Perhaps Hartshorne's putting “’social’” in quotation marks is a tacit admission of this? This is not a minor point, since Hartshorne wants to claim that "there are basic phenomenological issues between idealists and realists which appear to argue a difference in observational capacity or interest" (24 f.).  In other words, he wants to hold that “one subject [can] intuit, immediately enjoy, the enjoyment of others, or immediately suffer their pain or unhappiness," and, therefore, “can mean the same thing by the actuality of his own feelings and that of others” (25). But if, admittedly, the social analogy is precisely an analogy, derived from our relations with other human beings, the question is exactly parallel to the question whether we have a direct intuition of God as God.  This is in no way to deny “participation as the basic epistemological phenomenon" in the sense that we experience ourselves, others, and the whole as all alike concrete—subjects of internal, or constitutive relations to other terms themselves likewise subjects of such relations, and so more than "mere matter,” or “vacuous actuality,” in that they have no other basic attribute than extension, or extendedness, “spatio-temporal structure.” But, granting that there is the more or less clear experience of my own immediately past experiences through memory and of my immediately future experiences through anticipation, so that I do indeed have the basis for talking about "experience of experience,” one may still doubt whether I have any comparably clear experience of the experiences of my bodily cells, molecules, etc. or of the experience of God. Obviously, if panpsychistic theism, or theistic panpsychism is true, this is exactly what I must be experiencing whether I am explicitly conscious of doing so or not. But the question, of course, is whether this categorial metaphysics is true; and this question can hardly be answered by appeal to direct intuition when, admittedly, the very terms in which it is expressed are “borrowed” and can be justified as appropriate only by employing a set of very different terms.

44. If individuality, in the sense of acting or behaving as one, is the behavioristic criterion of mind, one can certainly say, if one fails to observe individuality, then one has no reason to infer mind.  But can this be converted, as Hartshorne converts it, without begging the question—namely, when he says that "if we do not discern freedom in inanimate nature it can only [sic!] be because we do not discern the individual constituents thereof" ("God and Nature": 59), which implies, contrapositively, "if we discern the individual constituents of inanimate nature, we discern freedom therein." But, then, the principle of our reasoning is not what Hartshorne himself says it is when he asserts, "The principle here is that only [sic!] what acts as one feels as one" (62), which implies, "if x feels as one, x acts as one" and, contrapositively, "if x does not act as one, x does not feel as one." To infer from the fact that x is and acts as an individual to the further fact that x is free and acts freely is to beg the question that Hartshorne's own stated principle leaves open—warranting, as it does, only the negative inference: if x does not act as and therefore is not an individual, x also does not act freely and is not free.

Addenda

Ad 5—The point that needs to be brought out here is that it is impossible to specify any positive meaning of a putatively analogical term distinct both from the meaning of the term used symbolically or metaphorically and from the meaning expressed by other strictly literal purely formal terms. The whole positive meaning of "memory" when used in the sense of "the mere idea of memory" is indistinguishable from the meaning expressed either by "memory" used as a symbol or metaphor or by the strictly transcendental idea of concreteness as involving internal relations to other concretes, and so on. Indeed, if it is used to mean anything materially more specific than "concreteness" as a transcendental, use of it commits the pathetic fallacy.

Ad 6—The differences between the three ontological types of concretes—events, individuals, and aggregates—can be stated purely formally by saying that events are singular but do not change; individuals are singular and do change; while aggregates change but are not singular. (Actually, "the subject of change” when an aggregate changes is either the individuals included in the aggregate or the individuals including it.  This is so, because, strictly and properly, only individuals can change, since change involves both an abstract variable—difference—and an abstract constant—identity or sameness.)

Ad 35—What does, or could, Hartshorne mean by “super-linguistic consciousness,” except all-inclusive relativity to all that is abstract as well as all that is concrete?  Since any event belonging to the career of the universal individual must be eminently, or transcendently, and, therefore, all-inclusively, relative, any such event must include all things, abstract and concrete, and, therefore, all reality, and so, in that sense, or for that reason, also all truth.