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  • Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom by Charles Hartshorne
  • Leon Niemoczynski
Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom, Charles Hartshorne. Edited by Donald Wayne Viney and Jincheol O. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. x + 176 pp. $75 cloth.

Creative Experiencing was an unpublished manuscript found among Hartshorne’s papers now deposited at the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology. Hartshorne mentions in the manuscript’s preface that he [End Page 85] considered the book to be the final part of a trilogy including Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (1970) and Wisdom as Moderation (1987). The book was edited and published under the direction of longtime Hartshorne scholars Donald Viney and Jincheol O.

“Metaphysics,” Hartshorne writes in the preface, “is the attempt to interpret concrete experience rationally, in terms of the most general principles of valid reasoning” (xi). The first chapter, “Some Formal Criteria of Good Metaphysics,” seeks to build on this definition by establishing “some good criteria for the distinction between good and bad metaphysics” (1). Whitehead, we are told, is the philosopher whose metaphysical system best demonstrates good criteria in the form of a moderation of metaphysical extremes.

Chapter 2, “My Eclectic Approach to Phenomenology,” articulates a phenomenological method that is a “descriptive science”—one that “gets its basic concepts from the most general aspects of experience” and that does not specifically reference the observer but experience itself” (11). Hartshorne articulates how his phenomenology is different from Husserl’s and Heidegger’s by emphasizing that the question of phenomenology should be: “As what are sensations experienced?” He explains that “experience-of-x is x plus something. But the relation of the two is no mere and. Experience-of-x includes x. Whitehead uses ‘prehend’ for this inclusion” (12). This is to say that experience and sense (feeling) are instead said to be one..

Chapter 3, “Negative Facts and the Analogical Inference to ‘Other Mind,’” argues that all verified negative judgments depend on positive characters. A complete absence of experience in another is impossible if an absolutely negative judgment concerning experience is by itself impossible. “‘Not conscious’ or ‘insentient’ is meaningful only if some positive character is incompatible with being conscious or sentient” (27). Stated differently, when it comes to the problem of other minds, “absolute absence [of experience] has no part in speculation” (27).

Chapter 4, “Perception and the Concrete Abstractness of Science,” builds on the previous chapter in that it articulates positive notions of the real “as nature might be (and once was) without any animals similar to man” (34). Perceptions in their abstractness “yield structure and quality, but neither one with distinctness and sharply individual detail” (35). These features may be discerned in such distinctness and detail infinitely—and taken as an ultimate principle, the definition of potential experience must be unlimited. In genuine abstractness one finds that experience does not only have spatiotemporal structure but certain qualities found in the definition of experience generally, “sensory or emotional” experience that may be a “rich treasure” for the sciences (37). [End Page 86]

Chapter 5, “Metaphysical Truth by Systematic Elimination of Absurdities,” outlines first, a mathematical approach to ontology where “mathematics seeks universal, nonempirical, and necessary truths” obtained via both procedure and the discernment of patterns. Second, the essay explains that if successful, metaphysics may articulate categorical but nonempirical statements (and classes of statements) about “the universe in its entirety yet also in its details,” where the truth of such statements depends on the elimination of absurdities and the identification of incoherence (43).

“The Case for Metaphysical Idealism” (chap. 6) consists of some familiar Hartshornian arguments for the position of panpsychism. This chapter essentially shows that panpsychism is not merely idealism but is rather a broad position concerning the nature of experience both concrete and abstract. In this chapter we also find that Hartshorne’s position implies anthrodecentrism. This comes to the fore in statements such as, “We understand that there is more in the world than we ourselves experience partly by taking into account what others experience. . . . The escape from the egocentric predicament is not by dismissing the very idea of a subject, but by recognizing a variety of...

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