Charles Hartshorne, Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom ed. by Donald Viney et al. (review)

This work contains thirteen essays that constitute Hartshorne's final contributions to "technical philosophy." Although they deal with a wide range of topics, they hang together in terms of the common themes of creativity and freedom. I will discuss these essays in terms of three groups.

First, it should be noted that five of the essays have never before been published; hence they are welcome additions to philosophical literature in process thought. One example is "My Eclectic Approach to Phenomenology." Here Hartshorne relies on both his experiences studying under Husserl and Heidegger in Germany in the 1920s (he wrote the first review in English of Heidegger's Being and Time) and his thorough knowledge of Bergson, James, and Peirce on the topic of experience (hence the designation "eclectic"). Although Hartshorne and Whitehead are not normally thought of as phenomenologists, their view of philosophy as the critique of abstractions and of metaphysics as descriptive complicates matters significantly for those who had not previously considered them phenomenologists. This essay has much to offer contemporary philosophers and theologians who are interested in either phenomenology or environmental thought (the latter due to Hartshorne's treatment of subhuman feeling, say the feelings of cells). This essay also contributes significantly to the understanding of what is perhaps the key tension in Hartshorne's philosophy, the tension between rationalistic ambition (e.g., his defense of the ontological argument or his liberal use of modal logic) and the desire to do justice to the concrete data of experience (e.g., in memory; in perception, which he claims is memory of the very recent past; or in religious feeling).

Second, of the remaining eight essays, two appeared in publications overseas that have not been readily available to English-language scholars (one from India and one from France). For example, "Politics and the Metaphysics of Freedom" deals with a special case of the self-determination that is ubiquitous in Hartshorne's philosophy. As the last essay in the book, this chapter makes clear the important practical consequences of the "philosophy of freedom" mentioned in the subtitle of the book. Determination of concrete singulars is never complete; there is always some degree of self-decision regarding the causal inheritance from the past. Implications of the "metaphysics of freedom" are explored in a nuanced way regarding subhuman reality, mentally deficient human beings, slaves, inhabitants of "totalitarian" states, and citizens in democracies.

Third, the other six essays, although originally published in well-known journals, are excellent pieces of scholarship that deserve another reading, especially in the context of Hartshorne's effort to bring together his disparate thoughts on creativity and freedom. That is, these essays at once reinforce each other and make possible insights that would not be possible if the essays were read individually. To cite one example, "The Meaning of 'Is Going To Be' " is a classic essay that deals in an insightful and clear way with both the complicated philosophical issue of the logical status of future contingents and a practical issue that often arises in the lives of reflective individuals. This practical issue concerns the (mistaken) idea that we are "destined" to have a certain "fate" in life; the idea that our happy or unhappy experiences were already "in the cards" before they occurred, or even before we were born. Regarding the technical philosophical issue, Hartshorne tries to resolve Aristotle's "sea battle" problem by distinguishing among three sorts of propositions that involve the major components of modal logic: propositions regarding what definitely will be (necessity), propositions regarding what definitely will not be (impossibility), and propositions regarding what perhaps will be or perhaps will not be (contingency). It is sometimes (erroneously) assumed that by acknowledging these three sorts of propositions we are violating the law of excluded middle, but Hartshorne has a careful argument showing that this is not the case. That is, predication can be trivalent while the...