Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne

Introduction

 Introduction f CHARLES HARTSHORNE WAS BORN in the nineteenth century and lived to philosophize in the twenty-first. Perhaps the most neglected aspect of his extensive and highly nuanced thought is his aesthetics, a discipline within philosophy to which he contributed as early as the 920s in his Harvard doctoral dissertation (he minored in English literature at Harvard). His efforts in aesthetics quite incredibly lasted into the 990s, over half a century after he cofounded the American Society for Aesthetics (and its associated journal, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism) in 942 (HL, 49). The purpose of the present book is both to explicate in detail his theory of aesthetics for the first time and to use this theory to show the superiority of neoclassical or process theism over the classical theism defended by traditionalist Jews, Christians, and Muslim believers. The parenthetical citations throughout the book alert the reader to the sources from Hartshorne that I have used rather liberally. Hartshorne’s own sources in aesthetics were myriad, as his extensive collection of books in art, art criticism, and aesthetics (now housed at the Center for Process Studies at the Claremont School of Theology) indicate. These sources will be cited throughout the book. A generation ago Whitehead’s aesthetics received definitive exploration by Donald Sherburne.1 But the present work is quite different from Sherburne’s magisterial book for at least three reasons. First, Hartshorne’s philosophy is theocentric in a way that Whitehead’s is not. Despite the fact that Sherburne’s atheistic interpretation of Whitehead (developed after his book on Whitehead’s aesthetics) is, from my point of view, unpersuasive for many reasons, it is nonetheless clear that his interpretation of Whitehead is at least plausible and must be DombrowskiFinalPgs. 1 2/2/04 5:34:11 PM 2 Divine Beauty taken seriously. But even Sherburne would seem to agree that it is not even remotely plausible to interpret Hartshorne’s thought along nonreligious lines. That is, Hartshorne’s philosophy is God-intoxicated, an inebriation (ironic in light of Hartshorne’s lifelong abstinence from alcohol) that affects his aesthetics at every turn, as we will see. Second, Hartshorne’s aesthetics, unlike Whitehead’s, appeals to an idiosyncratic but extremely interesting study of birdsong. And third, Hartshorne’s aesthetics, in contrast to Whitehead’s, relies heavily on the claim that sensation is a type of aesthetic feeling (at least Hartshorne uses different terminology from Whitehead’s). Indeed, the Greek word aesthesis originally meant nothing other than feeling or what we today might call experience; only later did it refer to a disciplined feeling for beauty. This etymology fits in nicely with the panpsychist view of Hartshorne. In this regard I would like to emphasize that the word “aesthetic” will be used in two different senses in this book. In the broad sense it refers to feeling, in general, as in the aforementioned Greek sense of the term, or to the sensory “feel” of things. But there is also a narrower sense of the term that refers to an experience of, or to a quality inherent in, a work of art, in particular. Context should indicate clearly which sense of the term I have in mind. We will see, however, that the issue is complicated by the fact that the broad sense of the term helps us to better understand our experience of specific works of art just as certain experiences we have of works of art illuminate aesthetic experience in general. That is, artistic creation (or appreciation) is, as Sherburne puts it in Whiteheadian terms, “simply a more concentrated, sophisticated version of an activity common to all actual occasions.”2 Again, context will help the reader determine which sense of the term I have in mind in a particular discussion . It is also interesting to note, especially because of Hartshorne’s fascinating treatments of panpsychism and of sensation as a type of feeling, that the broad meaning of “aesthetic” was the dominant one well into the nineteenth century. That is, the identification of “aesthetics ” with the arts in particular, is a relatively recent phenomenon.3 Hartshorne himself tells us of his interest in the aesthetics of birdsong as early as 920, the courses he taught in aesthetics at the UniDombrowskiFinalPgs . 2 2/2/04 5:34:11 PM Introduction 3 versity of Chicago and elsewhere as early as 928...