Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne

Chapter 6: Panexperientialism

90 CHAPTER SIX Panexperientialism f IN THIS CHAPTER I WOULD LIKE TO FINISH the effort, initiated in Chapter 4, to examine Hartshorne’s nonanthropocentric aesthetic as it relates to subhuman reality. We are in a more favorable position to understand panexperientialism as a result of the connection between sensation and feeling treated in Chapter 5. Regarding the traditional mind-body problem, we have seen that it is important to notice that three—not merely two—logical alternatives are open to us: () dualism, the view that reality is composed of two quite different sorts of stuff, soul-spirit-mind, on the one hand, and matter, on the other; (2) materialism, the view that material reality is all there is—that is, feeling or psyche (whether translated as soul, spirit, or mind) is in some way reducible to matter; and (3) panexperientialism or panpsychism or psychicalism, the view that all concrete singulars are psyche-like or at least exhibit some slight ability to feel or experience the difference between themselves and the rest of what is. We will see that, for Hartshorne, flowers and rocks have cells or atoms that are active, experiencing singulars, but they are not metaphysical monarchies that experience as wholes; they are metaphysical democracies, to use Hartshorne’s terms, borrowed from Whitehead. For a panexperientialist there is no completely inert or dead matter. (The ancient Greek word “psyche” originally meant “life” or “breath,” and only later referred to “cognition” or “mind.” Plato interestingly defines “psyche” in terms of self-motion—e.g., Phaedrus 245.) It should also be noted that, according to Hartshorne, materialism is really temporalistic dualism, positing an ancient mindless matter from which eventually emerged minded matter, such as we find ourselves to be. Hartshorne’s panexperientialism avoids both sorts of DombrowskiFinalPgs. 90 2/2/04 5:34:32 PM Panexperientialism 9 dualism: the explicit sort as well as the temporalistic sort that goes under the guise of materialism. Panexperientialism explains abstract material beings in general in terms of more concrete sentient instances of becoming. Although I have used “panexperientialism” as well as “panpsychism,” I will generally use the former term, coined by David Ray Griffin, for two reasons in the effort to capture well Hartshorne’s view. First, the term “psyche” often suggests to people a very high level of experience, whereas Hartshorne’s view is that all concrete singulars have some experience; and second, the term “psyche” often suggests an enduring individual, whereas, according to Hartshorne, the ultimate units of experience are momentary (IO, 59–63; ZF, 33–37; RS, 69–84).1 We should not assume that, because so much of the world is supposedly inert, we must choose between materialism and dualism or take an agnostic stand between these two positions. Hartshorne thinks it is a mistake to assume that we only have the flickering torches of dualism to raise against the encompassing darkness of a mechanical and aesthetically monotonous view of the world as seen through materialistic monism. We should also avoid the assumption, easily made by those who have not read Hartshorne carefully, that panexperientialism is to be equated with Berkeley’s idealism. The three options in the mind-body problem listed above—some form of dualism, some form of reductionistic materialism, and some form of panpsychism or panexperientialism —are metaphysical positions, not epistemological ones. Berkeley’s idealism, however, the view that to be is to be perceived, is an epistemological stance in opposition to realism. Hartshorne thinks that in epistemology the realists have been largely correct. That is, he believes that there are real instances of active, experiencing singulars quite apart from our experience of them (but perhaps not apart from God’s experience of them, where Berkeley’s view is a bit more congenial to Hartshorne’s). There is much evidence in favor of the claim that Hartshorne is a metaphysical idealist and an epistemological realist, a description that makes sense as long as by “metaphysical idealist” we do not create the mistaken, Berkeleyan impression that the physical world vanishes. The physical world does not vanish in Hartshorne in DombrowskiFinalPgs. 91 2/2/04 5:34:33 PM 92 Divine Beauty that aggregates of active, concrete singulars can be found in cancerous tumors and runaway trains: physical realities that are quite real! Hartshorne sums up his view as follows: My contentions are, that the realists have been largely right, and...