We have seen that two extremes are to be avoided in our language about God, on Hartshorne's view. One is that we could "capture" deity in a verbal formula that would eliminate doubt and the other is that we cannot say anything coherent about God. The former extreme leads to dogmatism or idolatry, whereas the latter leads to agnosticism or atheism (EA, 39). In between these two extremes lies a judicious mean, he thinks, wherein three levels of discourse about God can be distinguished: literal, analogical, and symbolic (or metaphorical). Literal concepts and terms deal with the formal and most abstract matters in philosophy of religion. These concepts and terms are not matters of degree, but rather deal with all or none matters. For example, either God is absolute or necessary in existence or not. Or again, either God is relative or contingent in actuality (i.e., in the mode of divine existence in relation to creatures from moment to moment) or not. Literal terms when applied to God classify propositions of a certain logical type (LP, 140). Only God is in one aspect (existence) strictly and maximally absolute and in another aspect (actuality or mode of existence) strictly and maximally related to others (DR, 32).
We have also seen that at the opposite end of the spectrum of intelligible discourse about God is that which relies on material (i.e., on symbolic or metaphorical) concepts. An example of such material predication is found when we describe God as monarch or shepherd or soul for the body of the world. This last symbol is crucial in the present chapter. Here we are clearly dealing with a matter of degree rather than with all or nothing possession of the property in question (EA, 21, 28, 38, 41). 1
In between the most formal and the most material levels of religious discourse is analogical discourse about God, concerning which Hartshorne exhibits a significant, albeit a largely unacknowledged, debt to St. Thomas Aquinas. As in St. Thomas, there is the interesting question as to whether analogical discourse ultimately depends on literal discourse: if an analogy points toward some similarities and some differences between the things compared, some literal terms are required to secure the similarities. For example, analogical language about God depends on the literal distinction between God's necessary existence (as demonstrated, say, in the ontological and other arguments) and our merely contingent existences.
For my purposes in this chapter it is crucial to notice that the key analogical terms applied by Hartshorne to God are feeling or sentience (rather than higher order thinking), terms that have been at work throughout Hartshorne's aesthetics regarding the capacity for aesthetic sensitivity. There are some notable differences, however, in the way God feels in contrast to the way we feel. For example, God eminently feels all creaturely suffering, whereas we feel it in a fragmentary way that is mixed with our own self-interested desires. But to claim that we were completely ignorant of God's aesthetic mode of appreciating the world would be to concede the agnostic's or atheist's case. Feeling terms (including love) are the truly inclusive ones, as we saw above in the chapter on Hartshorne's panexperientialism. On this view God has inclusive aesthetic experience of all the subordinate feelers; God is the universal subject of experience. Feeling may be ubiquitous, but not feeling of all other feeling (EA, 26, 31, 41). (There is a peculiar sense, however, in which for Whitehead, at least, everything is everywhere at all times, but only by way of negative prehensions where occasions exclude all of the data in the universe except those that are relevant at the moment. 2)
Before further explicating both the symbol of God as the soul for the body of the world and the analogy of God as the universal subject of aesthetic feeling (there being no rigid distinction between symbols and analogies; the former approximate the latter), one other sort of religious language in Hartshorne should be mentioned again. It is a type of literal language that I have labelled "literal-2" so as to distinguish it from the formal, literal-1 language discussed above. It is our normal religious practice to start with human concepts and terms, which we often take to be literal, then apply them analogically to God. But, strictly speaking, when dealing with a feeling such as love it is God who literally-2 loves, whereas the creatures do so only analogically or symbolically. We do not love in exactly the same way that God does, but our love nonetheless counts for something when we imitate God's love rather than the other way around, Hartshorne thinks. To put the issue differently, it is not so much the case that where there is religious experience or experience of beauty on our part there is awareness of God so much as our experience of God or of divine beauty enables us to experience love or beauty in other creatures. Or again, God knows in the best way possible, in a literal-2 way, whereas we know vaguely and selectively. It is not so much that God is anthropomorphic as that we are deimorphic, on Hartshorne's view (EA, 25, 30, 33, 38).
One of the reasons for all of these distinctions is to contribute to a conception of God and to language about God that will enable us to avoid Pascal's conclusion that the God of the philosophers is not the God of religious experience. 3 Pascal's conclusion is justified regarding traditional theism, however. The effort to develop a conception of God that helps to clarify, rather than to render unintelligible, religious experience has been hampered by the Kantian assumption that whereas science is empirical in a straightforward sense, this is not the case regarding religious experience. For example, many contemporary philosophers would point to the pervasiveness of non-believers as strong evidence against universal human experience of God and as at least prima facie evidence against any trustworthy evidence for God. 4
The pre-modern world, however, did not feel as acutely as we do today this sharp distinction in that pre-modern believers (along with American pragmatists like James and Peirce) did not automatically dismiss the empirical claims made by religious believers regarding divine influence in their lives. The Hartshornian response to the Kantian distinction mentioned in the previous paragraph is to urge the following: there are two levels of human experience. On one level we vaguely experience "the inclusive something" and on a higher level we experience "the inclusive something" as "the inclusive something." The former may be ubiquitous in humanity even if the latter is not. It is only when someone consciously experiences the inclusive something as such and realizes that it is the model for all experience that one comes close to approximating one's telos as a human being. Agnostics and atheists are not as far removed from theists as they sometimes think, however, when it is considered that they also have contact with the first level of experience when they move about in a world that is not felt as alien to them and which, at least in aspiration and to some degree in practice, makes sense. An experience of the mighty whole at this level, it should be noted, often occurs in atheists or agnostics along with a denial of the corresponding experience at the second level (EA, 20, 31-32).
The aim of life for those theists who affirm the inclusive something as the inclusive something is to enrich life and to contribute beauty to the all-inclusive life that is alone capable of enjoying the total beauty of all creation, according to Hartshorne. As Mohammed Valady puts the point, on this view the Hartshornian categorical imperative is to facilitate those aesthetic and ethical values that one would like to see as part of the inclusive value—-God. 5 Our contributions to the divine life are easy to miss if we, like other animals, tend to see ourselves, or at least our group, at the center. We have a tendency to be egocentric or ethnocentric rather than theocentric. Some human beings also have the unfortunate tendency to view their lives as (divinely or scientifically) determined. For example, Hardy wrote great literature, but his deterministic, distorted view of life (which contains a satirical view of a God who mismanages the world) is hardly a livable philosophy that is conducive to a defensible aesthetic, as Hartshorne sees things. That is, determinism leads to a grim theology at odds with the partially open future involved in process contributionism (ZF, 52, 54).
The contributionist view involves not only a symbolic description of the world in terms of God as the soul for the body of the world and an analogical description of God as preeminent aesthetic feeling, it also involves a view of the afterlife. Two main options can be considered once the reductionistic materialist view that death ends all is dismissed. First, the afterlife may involve the continuation of a person's career into the indefinite future in some supernatural form (without a body, with a resurrected body, with a different body, etc.). The second option, however, is to believe in God as the end of our lives rather than as a means toward the continuation of our own careers. On this second view, God everlastingly possesses whatever beauty we or others have experienced. God makes possible the (Whiteheadian) immortality of the past in that God's actuality, rather than God's bare existence, is the ultimate heir of our aesthetic achievements. This will no doubt fail to satisfy those who prefer the first option and who assume the first option's orthodoxy. It should nonetheless be noted that the effect of the first option is to make us rivals to God in our infinite careers. That is, otherworldly belief in personal immortality not only distracts us from our real problems, it tempts us into thinking that we, rather than God, exist necessarily (ZF, 57).
However, two different questions should be separated: do we use God as a means to our ends?, do we have a personal career after death? Kant, for example, separates these two when he famously claims that we should not strive to gain the rewards of heaven, but rather to be worthy of heaven's rewards. At times Hartshorne seems to conflate these two questions, perhaps because: (a) many or most believers in personal immortality do so themselves; and (b) personal survival signals a return to the idea that there is no genuine tragedy, but Hartshorne thinks that it is obvious that there is genuine tragedy. To be fair to those who believe in personal immortality, however, we should be clear that such a belief does not in itself have to be connected to a self-interested theory of motivation.
Some great novelists, Austen among them, have treated what it takes to find real happiness on earth without the idea of personal immortality and without threats of everlasting punishment or everlasting bliss for us. But it should be reiterated that process theism has not yet received a great artist who artistically concretizes its abstract philosophical and theological ideas the way Dante or Milton and the (Italian and northern) Renaissance painters did for traditional theism. It is quite amazing how Dante and other writers and visual artists squeezed artistic value from the "theological catastrophe" of traditional theism, Hartshorne urges (ZF, 59, 61). If this language sounds hyperbolic, it should be remembered that for centuries traditional theists have saddled religious believers with literally gut-wrenching questions regarding why an omnibenevolent God would send a plague, a deformed child, or the death of a young mother to a family. The answer to these questions is partly philosophical/theological, in that divine omnipotence is not theoretically defensible once it is realized that being is power, and partly aesthetic, in that a divine tyrant who has, or could have if He wanted it, a monopoly of power is an aesthetic monstrosity.
The proposition that there is a being who enjoys complete control over all other beings is a commonplace in traditional theological theories. According to Hartshorne, this implies that no other beings could have freedom at all if what "freedom" means is the ability to decide things for oneself without complete determination from the outside. Of course some (e.g., Nelson Pike 6) will object to Hartshorne's view here by claiming that there is a distinction between God having all power to completely determine the creatures and using that power. That is, some will claim that God chooses to allow creatures to make their own choices, but that God could completely determine them. Hartshorne would respond to this criticism in at least two ways. First, if being is the power to make some decisions (once again, literally the cutting off of some possibilities), then it is by no means clear that we can make conceptual sense of the view that creatures are or could be completely determined. And second, if God could prevent innocent suffering, but chooses not to do so, as some of Hartshorne's critics allege, then these critics would at this point be saddled with the nastiest version of the theodicy problem that neoclassical theism is meant to solve.
Absolute freedom in one being and zero freedom in all others, however, makes no sense metaphysically or experientially, as James showed in his famous essay "The Dilemma of Determinism." 7 One wonders how to make sense of determinism when we are in the process of making a choice. Metaphysically there is the quandary regarding how to make sense of an agent that deals only with puppets of itself rather than with (Platonic) self-movers. A complete absence of self-determination would seem to portend absence of a positive, coherent presence in the world. Freedom is, if anything, social and involves a plurality of influential agents. Not even atoms or radioactive waves are completely inert in that they are, in a sense, active singulars. A zero of free activity would seem to be equivalent to a zero of actuality.
In Hartshorne's view, in each free act we and other creatures add something to the definiteness of the divine actuality. The qualified indeterminism of the world is partly due to chance (the absence of fully determining omnipotence) and partly due to creaturely creativity itself. Some of the difficulty with the traditional theistic view is in the overuse of interpersonal symbols (e.g., God as father or ruler) rather than organic ones (e.g., God as mind or soul or nervous system for the body of the world). The latter symbol is not immune from criticism, as when it is combined with causal determinism in the Stoics or Spinoza. "Free beings" is, in a way, a redundancy whereas a "wholly unfree being," as found in the Stoics or Spinoza, is a contradiction in terms, once again on the Platonic assumption that being is the power to affect, or at least to be affected by, others (ZF, 62-63, 66).
Only by rejecting belief in personal immortality and by accepting belief in at least limited human freedom are we in a position to embrace, or even to understand, Hartshorne's view implied in the lines of the Wallace Stevens poem "Sunday Morning": "Death is the mother of beauty." 8 Not only human freedom but human life itself is definitely bounded by birth and death. The definiteness provided by death can be seen, in the effort to appreciate the beauty of life, as the "gift of finitude," to use Hartshorne's phrase (ZF, 66). To vaguely suppose that we can personally survive death is to tend to rob life of its vividness, its intensity, he thinks. Stevens aptly calls these vague suppositions the "chimeras of the grave." Rather than hold out for personal immortality we should instead concentrate our aesthetic attention on the definitely beautiful career we have here (ZF, 66).
To say that death is partially constitutive of the beauty of life is not to deny, but to support, Hartshorne thinks, the belief that God cherishes the uniqueness we contribute to the divine life. Biologists, in particular, help us to appreciate the place of death in the overall scheme of things. If religious they may very well be especially cognizant of the intrinsic value of the natural process even in its instrumental contribution to God. Whereas non-religious scientists nonetheless imply at the very least a vague feeling of the wondrous, beautiful whole to which every species makes its contribution, as in the aforementioned hymn in praise of the beauty of the web of life found at the end of Darwin's The Origin of Species. 9 Both scientists and nature lovers, in general, have a tendency to need convincing when there is proposed a radical diminution of natural beauty, say through industrial or suburban "development." As before, each one of us is of more value than many sparrows, but how many more is open to question, especially when we exhibit a tendency to overconsume. Perhaps as individuals we are not more valuable than a whole sparrow species (WM, 94, 120, 126).
The final definiteness of a career that takes place at death lends support to the view that the fundamental values are not ethical but aesthetic, as Hartshorne details in an essay in WM titled "The Aesthetic Meaning of Death." This definiteness illuminates the fact that cognitive values are not universal in that we value experience not merely as a means to knowledge. That is, aesthetic experience is wider than and includes cognitive experience, such that getting clear on what makes aesthetic experience definite helps us to appreciate living experience as such. It is quite easy, however, to miss the definiteness of aesthetic experience by assuming, for example, that partial disorder is the opposite of beauty rather than partially constitutive of it. We have seen that orderliness unrelieved by surprise or irregularity (death being the prime example of these) does not yield perfect beauty but aesthetic disvalue in the form of monotony. Admittedly death or any other chaos are in themselves not aesthetic values, but are nonetheless partially constitutive of the aesthetic value of life as a whole. Even a life lived in intermittent anticipation of death is aesthetically richer, Hartshorne thinks, than one of unremitting monotony (WM, 51-52).
We have also seen that on Hartshorne's view intensity is an aesthetic criterion that can be discussed in abstraction from other aesthetic criteria like unified diversity or differentiated unity. But in concrete reality it is hard to maintain a Zorba-like zest for life without sufficient variety and contrast of experience. A monotonous life tends to be lived in a correspondingly tepid way. The richer the contrasts integrated, and the richer the integration itself, the more likely we will be to lead our lives with élan. In fact, when these rich contrasts partially transcend our ability to integrate them, our lives take on a sublime character especially conducive to the flourishing of religious emotions (WM, 52-53).
This flourishing of religious emotions is not necessarily due to a monopolar view of God as a formless being who is infinite in every way. "Infinite" is not a synonym for "divine," on Hartshorne's view, in that God's existence may be infinite, but not God's concrete actuality in relation to finite creatures. The greatest works of art, for example, are also finite: great novels, symphonies, and poems always have a last sentence, note, or word. In this regard we are finite like these works of art, whereas God, who is infinite in existence, is not (WM, 52-53).
With each moment of experience we add variation to our lives, which require both this variation as well as a certain degree of repetition, the latter of which is embodied in our "personality traits." The balance in this aesthetic theme of expectedness and variation, found in animals as well as in human beings, Hartshorne thinks, changes somewhat as we age and especially as we approach the end of a natural lifespan. The variations are added on to a wider and deeper base and are assimilated accordingly. At any age, however, death could rise up to surprise us, a fact that is easily understandable if the world is not determined by absolute power. That is, in order to respond adequately to the theodicy problem it is crucial to realize that divine purpose is not primarily illustrated in the time and manner of our deaths. In this sense all life is fragile and tragic, as wise people have always known, Hartshorne claims. (Hartshorne himself almost died at the age of twenty—-RM, 289). This fragility and tragedy are, via divine feeling and knowledge, transferred to the divine life itself. Once again, because God is, in a way, made finite by our tragedies, the best way to put the contrast between us and God is perhaps not in terms of our finitude versus God's infinity, but rather in terms of our fragmentariness versus God's all-inclusiveness (WM, 53-54).
Further, God's ability to re-spond to creatures implies real finite relations with finite creatures. If God were "wholly infinite" God would have to actualize all possibilities with all creatures, assuming for the moment that this is a possibility (which it is not, on Hartshorne's view). All concrete actualization is finite, definite. "To identify deity with the sheerly infinite is to identify deity with pure possibility" (WM, 55). The most poignant of God's finite, indeed individual, relations with creatures, so far as we know (angels?), are those with human beings, some of whom, unlike animals, experience their tragedy at a highly self-conscious level. It is precisely this self-consciousness that leads many human beings into self-pity and anthropocentrism and away from contributionism and theocentrism, the beliefs that the ultimate value of our lives consists in the degree to which we contribute something positive to the everlasting divine reality and that God is the central reality of the cosmos, respectively. Our medical powers to extend human life are wonderful examples of progress only if they do not seduce us into anthropocentric illusions about ourselves. These powers are genuinely progressive, however, when they enable us to contribute more beautiful moments, and beauty of a greater intensity, to God (WM, 56-58).
Just as we creatively advance through each new drop of experience, so also at each moment we experience the death of the previous one. Against the background of this Whiteheadian "perpetual perishing," 10 death is nothing other than the final phase of this continual loss. (However, Hartshorne's belief that God preserves the subjective immediacy of our experiences leads him to dislike the language of perpetual perishing.) Death should confirm for us what we could know on the basis of everyday experience of loss: the meaning of life transcends the ego and instead consists in our contributions to the everlasting whole of things, the personification and concretization of which is God. The divine good is more permanent than the good of the individual or even of the species, assuming, of course, that Hartshorne is correct regarding the ontological argument and other components of his global argument for the existence of God. What is the value, say, of the ancient Celts, whom we now know only through a few of their artifacts? If they lived well or ill, what does it matter to us? Hartshorne has cogent responses to these questions not easily improved upon by the non-theist. The theistic contributionist thinks that although death is the termination of our careers, it is not the destruction of them.
Analogously, reading the last sentence of a book does not destroy that book: "God will read the books of our lives forever after" (WM, 61). That is, God will give our fleeting experiences abiding significance by accurately remembering them. Further, if we assume that God is omnibenevolent, then each "book" that God reads would be ideally valued and not contribute less in proportion to the whole as God reads more "books." Indeed, the gospel writer assures us that, according to Jesus, God cares even for the fall of a sparrow (Matthew 10: 28), a claim that was not lost on Shakespeare, as evidenced in the last act of "Hamlet." This is not to be interpreted as being absorbed into an impersonal absolute, but rather as participation in the abiding, personal, life of God, to whom we are to offer our entire hearts and minds, Hartshorne thinks, as the biblical tradition also attests (WM, 62). In fact, God (as the greatest knower and carer) not only remembers what we remember, but even remembers experiences of which we were never even conscious, and so has our experiences to a maximum of intensity in a way we never did.
The beauty of the world as a whole is, in a way, hidden from the non-theist, although the quite public discoveries of science indicate to us all how grand the cosmos really is. One of the prime tasks for the theist is to reconcile this grandeur with the obvious evil that exists in the world. Such a reconciliation is a much more likely prospect in process or neoclassical theism than in traditional theism. In fact, Hartshorne's process metaphysics elaborates the intelligible beauty of the world, abstractly conceived, whereas religious experience (or mysticism) conveys such beauty to us concretely. Both of these testify to the accompanying, divine melody of all existence (LP, 127, 287-288, 292, 297).
It was only with great difficulty that traditional theists like Jonathan Edwards could assimilate into their systems the idea in aesthetics that the greater the variety in equal uniformity, the greater the beauty. He, like most traditional theists, borrowed selectively yet unwittingly from the Greeks: beauty is unity, order, and avoidance of diversity or randomness. In non-human reality, as well as in the aesthetic practices of artists and critics themselves, however, beauty is just as much the avoidance of too much unity and order. The defense of aesthetic moderation, however, should not be confused with a lack of daring. Hartshorne himself agrees (albeit at an abstract level rather than at the concrete, contingent level) with the bold aesthetic thesis of Keats that beauty is truth, and truth beauty, as we saw in the previous chapter. 11 Necessary truths, in particular, including those in mathematics, cannot yield aesthetic disvalue; this is because contemplation of them is satisfying. Even contingent truths, however, have some aesthetic value, some immediate appeal or beauty above a mere zero level, Hartshorne thinks. Nonetheless, to say that beauty itself is good does not, obviously enough, provide us with a guide to action that can replace the very complicated decision making procedures that are needed in ethics (CA, 24, 55-56). Likewise, agreeing with the above dictum from Keats does not mean that we are willing to do away with the very complicated procedures used in science that are needed to get at the truth, or at least to avoid falsity, regarding the natural world.
Each experience is an act and every act realizes (or at least strives to realize) a value. At times the values realized are ethical, but far more prevalent, Hartshorne thinks, is the realization of aesthetic value, broadly construed, which involves intuitive or concrete awareness of some sort. It is out of such concrete awareness that we build an ethics or a metaphysics or even an aesthetic theory. This last would have to include at least the following: an account of aesthetic qualities (as found above in Chapters Five and Six on sensation and panpsychism) and an account of aesthetic structures, in which aesthetic qualities are combined (as found above in Chapter Two on beauty as a mean between extremes). The most successful aesthetic combinations can be called harmonies, which are relations between things that are both felt to be different from each other yet felt as if they are in some way properly connected to each other. Octaves in music provide a primitive or insipid example of harmonies of this kind (RS, 44-45).
The failure to achieve any sophisticated harmony due to too little contrast (insipidity) or too little similarity (chaos) can be avoided both through bold use of contrast, wherein strength and vitality is given to a work of art, or through subtlety/delicacy, wherein an effete approach attracts our attention, Hartshorne thinks. And we have seen that the importance of contrast is not confined to art. For example, life's harmony is threatened when everything is reduced to uniformity, as is the case in an overly aggressive egalitarianism. Of course, Hartshorne's intent here is not to defend the violent inequalities of present capitalist society. Indeed, he thinks that present capitalism is problematic in part because it is ugly; there seems to be little unity shared between the wealthy and the disenfranchised. A far more beautiful contribution to God would be a mixed economic (Rawlsian?) system wherein the talented would be rewarded precisely because their talents would be to everyone's advantage, especially the least advantaged. 12 Unity-in-diversity is once again the key (RS, 46-47).
To use some helpful examples from Brian Henning, a novice pianist who plays "Green Sleeves" produces only pretty music because the chords lack sufficient complexity. Conversely, a symphony with ten-thousand different parts played simultaneously would be so complex that it would be impossible for us to grasp. The human brain, at present, seems like such a symphony in that it involves a complexity that is still largely beyond our grasp. Henning prefers to say that the beauty we can experience is "larger" than that experienced by a bird, with God's experience of beauty "larger" still than ours. In addition, the beauty we can experience is more complex, more profound, and more intense than that experienced by a bird.
I would like to come at this important issue in Hartshorne from another angle. Despite the fact that red is the opposite of green, in some circumstances the two harmonize. So also competition is the opposite of cooperation, yet in the above mentioned mixed economic (again, Rawlsian?) scheme the two can be harmonized. Nature can and often should be our model in both art and economics for aesthetically rich contributions to deity. It is seldom insipid or monotonous; even a tundra landscape provides more diversity than may initially seem to be the case. Or again, whereas the old physics offered us a world that was highly predictable and monotonous, the new physics is much more satisfying aesthetically, Hartshorne thinks. It is also satisfying, and not surprising, to know that it is more accurate than the old physics. It would be odd if the less accurate theory were the more beautiful one (RS, 47-48).
Science and art thus have a structural kinship despite their obvious differences. That is, these two disciplines ideally are harmoniously related in their everlasting contributions. In both disciplines we experience both expectation and surprise. Skillful artists knowingly provide the aesthetic pleasure of surprise, whereas in science it is impossible in principle to predict in advance the future of the discipline. Scientists actually predict nature better (although not even here with absolute assurance) than they do the future of science itself, Hartshorne notes. Process philosophers are famous (or infamous) for actually claiming not only that events in nature are to some extent unpredictable, but also that the laws of nature change over long periods of time. This is analogous to the claim that the particular way in which we experience harmony in art changes, as in modern appreciation of the dissonant "harmonies" in Stravinsky that would have been difficult for earlier aestheticians to appreciate. But the principle of aesthetic value as a dual mean has thus far remained relatively constant. Real change occurs, however, the moment we become too familiar with a piece of music such that we tire of it when we too definitely anticipate its future passages. Unmitigated conservatism in art or science seems doomed (RS, 48-51).
The partial unpredictability of reality in general is aesthetically pleasant, but it is also sometimes a source of suffering and tragedy in that partially free individuals in great numbers are bound to clash at some point. In addition, suffering and tragedy are also partially due to the inner conflict in human beings themselves between the desire to facilitate the common good and the desire to pursue one's own or one's group interests. The sublime symbol of these facts in Christianity is the cross (RS, 148-149). The aesthetic dicta to "Be not too predictable" and "Be not too unpredictable" enable us to go a long way toward avoiding avoidable suffering and tragedy, but, unfortunately, there is still much suffering and tragedy that is unavoidable, on Hartshorne's view. By treating each day, indeed each moment to the extent possible, as a new opportunity for richness of aesthetic experience we might come as asymptotically close as possible to blessedness in that such richness is ultimately contributed to the divine life (DL, 207).
The cosmos is nonetheless beautiful despite the clear examples of suffering and tragedy. This beauty is constituted, according to Hartshorne, by the innumerable centers of aesthetic experience creatively bound together in a harmonious way, a harmony that is best explained not in terms of a principle of divine love, but rather in terms of eminent divine love itself (NT, 106). This reinforces the view that aesthetic value of some sort, in this case love, is the generic category that includes other value. To return to the Keats dictum, it is probably more accurate to say that truth is a form of beauty than it is to say the reverse. Cognitive value (e.g., truth) and ethical value (e.g., goodness) are alike in being instrumentally important to the extent that they foster the intrinsic value of present or future experiences. When these intrinsic values are present rather than future, we can accurately say that virtue is its own reward (CS, 308). Once again, however, the point here is neither to trivialize ethics nor to do away with debate regarding the complex decision-making procedures that are needed to do ethics well.
Death can be a great evil if it is premature or ugly or painful, but death simply as such is a good, it is valuable. This is because it facilitates our realization that life is, among other things, an aesthetic problem: how to enrich a finite number of moments of experience, how to savor them in their finitude. Only the death of God makes no sense, as the ontological argument shows, in that the non-existence of the greatest conceivable being is a contradiction in terms. Human life is appreciated in the living of it. Its worth, however, is measured by something external to it in terms of its contribution to something more enduring than itself. This aesthetic theory of death not only facilitates, but, in a way, forces us to value the excitements and longings of childhood, the productive work of middle age, and, it is to be hoped, the serenity of old age. Any human personality, even one like Hartshorne's that lasted over a hundred years, is a theme with a finite number of variations. In a peculiar way we can even say, Hartshorne thinks, that death does not pose a problem for us so much as it solves the aesthetic problem of life (CS, 309-310, 321; ZF, 206).
The apophatic theologians were certainly correct to emphasize that it would be presumptuous of us to claim to know in minute detail what God's purposes are. However, this point can be exaggerated, according to Hartshorne. If God is at least preeminent love, then it seems we can know God's purpose at least in outline: it is the beauty of the world or the harmonious happinesses of the creatures. For example, even the writings of the great apophatic mystics of the Byzantine tradition are grouped under the title Philokalia: love of beauty. 13 Each creature has glimpses of, or feelings for, this beauty; but, presumably, only God enjoys it adequately and everlastingly (OO, 25).
Hartshorne admires the Jews-—ancient and some recent-—who accept death as the end of a human career. We are distinct in being the only animals, as far as we can tell, who foresee the inevitability of our eventually dying. In this sense Frost and Omar Khayyam and other poets are correct in believing in the inevitability of death. Only a theist, however, would be concerned that one of the problems with belief in subjective immortality is that it makes us rivals to God; it is a sort of hubris. Dickens, for example, in The Old Curiosity Shop, makes it quite clear that the promise of everlasting reward and the threat of everlasting punishment are not needed to bring out a refined version of Christianity in little Nell, who comes to believe, as did the ancient Jews, that people live on after their death in the memory of others (BA, 380; ML, 61-65).
There is no obvious consensus among process thinkers, however, regarding immortality. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki tries to bring about a rapprochement between Hartshorne's objective immortality or contributionism, on the one hand, and belief in subjective immortality, on the other. On the standard view of Hartshorne's position, she thinks, "we are like carbon become diamonds by the very intensity of pressure brought about as the weight of such infinity bears down upon our mortality." 14 Despite the fact that Hartshorne uses the terminology of objective immortality, he nonetheless lays the groundwork for subjective immortality, she thinks. If it is the case, as Hartshorne holds, that only God is able to prehend another occasion completely and vividly, without eliminations of any kind, then God prehends our subjective occasions as subjective. By contrast, our fragmentary prehensions "murder to dissect," to use Wordsworth's language so dear to both Whitehead and Hartshorne. 15 The question from Hartshorne at this point would probably be: is the subjective immediacy that is retained in God to be associated with our subjective immortality? In any event, even if Suchocki is a bit ambitious in associating God's prehensions of our subjective immediacy with subjective immortality (in that these prehensions are God's, not ours), she nonetheless provides a service to neoclassical theists by pointing out the "balm in Gilead" that is discernable in Hartshorne's view. Her achievement consists in pointing out that prehension might work both ways in a sort of mutual immanence: God co-experiences our suffering with us and we might co-experience its transformation (or better, its transfiguration) in God (see TD).
Randall Auxier is like Suchocki in relying on Hartshorne's TD in the effort to defend subjective immortality. And like Suchocki he argues that Hartshorne's own doctrine is objective immortality or contributionism, but it should be subjective immortality. But Auxier's view is somewhat different from Suchocki's, as is indicated in the following quotation:
But she is wrong in assuming that upon death the locus of subjective experiencing either shifts or is transformed in such a way as to be relocated in God. This shows a basic confusion regarding what our relation to God has been in life. There were always two loci of our subjective immediacy in life-—our physical actuality, and our existence in God. That is, there was never any complete sense in which I, in life, am the only (or even the main) locus of my own experience. God is having my experiences as I have them, but to a much greater degree. God's experience of my subjective immediacy is more subjective and more immediate than my own experience of it in life. Let me suggest that after physical death, the only important difference in me is that a certain limitation upon my experience of my own subjective immediacy is lifted, and I come to experience even myself only as a self-in-God. 16
Auxier's version of subjective immortality, in contrast to Suchocki's, involves the idea that the "I" that dies does not become less, but rather more, as a result of death.
In death we do not lose ourselves, but gain ourselves, he thinks, such that our present existence is merely larval. That is, at death our actual limitations are altered, but our existential ones are not. On Auxier's use of Hartshorne's distinction between existence and actuality, our existence is personal in the sense that we receive personhood only through an act of God, and such a reception is not negated by death. Indeed, Auxier thinks that subjectivity is enhanced at death. Because of this enhanced subjectivity, Auxier thinks that we need not get aesthetically bored with everlasting existence, as Hartshorne fears, nor need we give up, as Hartshorne does, on the idea that there might be some sort of final judgment, at least in the sense that God's just treatment of me in my subjective immortality will involve a sense of justice that is similar to a human one. 17
One can imagine at least four different responses that Hartshorne could make to Suchocki's and Auxier's careful attempts to expand on Hartshorne's own principles regarding objective immortality so as to have them consistent with subjective immortality. First, there is indeed something of a systole-diastole sequence between subjective experience in human beings and divine prehension and transformation (or transfiguration) of that experience: first a human being has a vivid experience, God prehends and transforms (or transfigures) it, then some human beings who have religious experiences are aware of God doing this; the process subsequently starts all over again. But the fact that God prehends the subjective experiences of human beings as subjective does not alter the fact that such prehensions are in God. For Hartshorne it is true that all of our experiences are preserved in God, hence he winces whenever interpreters try to describe his view in Whiteheadian terminology like "perpetual perishing." However, if God preserves our subjective experiences as subjective, this is a far cry, he thinks, from our doing so. Analogously, we can imagine live cells in our bodies that have had their cell walls damaged by high heat that causes intense pain for us. Even after these cells die we can still remember the localized pain that occurred when we were burned (even if we cannot do so with complete accuracy and vividness in the divine way). But the cells are still dead.
Second, a related disagreement between Hartshorne, on the one hand, and Suchocki and especially Auxier, on the other, surrounds a defensible use of pronouns. In the long quotation from Auxier above, it can be seen that Auxier is willing to refer to personal identity without having a body (see especially the use of the word "I" in the last sentence of the quotation). This indicates a flirtation with the seventeenth century dualism that Whitehead (starting in Science and the Modern World) and Hartshorne have consistently opposed. Hartshorne's panexperientialism can also be termed a type of dynamic hylomorphism or dynamic hylozoism, wherein every concrete, physical singular has an experiential or lifelike or psychic capacity. However, according to Hartshorne not only is it incorrect to posit a concrete singular without an experiential dimension, it is equally misleading to posit a psyche without some sort of concrete embodiment. Whitehead's language concerning each occasion having both a mental pole and a physical pole is helpful here. 18 And for Hartshorne, even God is embodied: God is the World Soul for the body of the world; or again, the natural world as a whole is the divine body. The implication of this sort of thinking, as Hartshorne sees things, is that when a human body disintegrates, so does the soul/body (or mind/body) complex. That is, for Hartshorne, human beings are not souls (Auxier would say "persons") who can live without bodies the way angels are alleged to live; whereas Auxier compares our lives after bodily death to the lives of angels. Nor are human beings bodies without souls or minds. Rather, on Hartshorne's view human beings are dynamic, mortal "soulbodies" or "mindbodies," to coin some terms that help to describe his view. Finally, one of the main problems with believing in disembodied, angelic cogitos is that such a disengagement from the natural world is precisely the seventeenth century move that left the natural world devoid of psyche and hence amenable to exploitation in that it was seen to be composed of vacuous actualities. All of these matters are commonplaces in Hartshorne's writings.
Third, Hartshorne is convinced that human life is tragic, whereas Suchocki's biblical "balm in Gilead" and Auxier's belief in rewards, if not punishments, for the "I" in the afterlife run the risk of trivializing this tragedy. (I do not say that Suchocki and Auxier necessarily trivialize the tragedy of life, only that on the grounds of their respective views they run the risk of doing so.) Further, for Hartshorne it is crucial to notice that if tragedy occurs (the death of a teen, for example) no being with memory of that tragedy can ever escape tragedy in its future. That is, both Suchocki and Auxier, despite their caution, have a much stronger sense than Hartshorne that justice will (or could be) served in the afterlife. Hartshorne, by contrast, agrees with Wordsworth that "what having been, must ever be." 19
And fourth, in addition to running the risk of being in tension with Hartshorne's aesthetic concept of tragedy, Suchocki and Auxier do the same regarding his aesthetic concept of monotony. Although our subjective experiences are preserved everlastingly, it is God who preserves them. Throughout his career, and especially in his comparison of our songs and those of birds, Hartshorne emphasizes the fact that we are biological animals. As such, we are likely to find life less vivid when we are old in that each new and potentially exciting experience is added to a larger and larger base. This tends, however, to bring about a serenity and repose that is itself an aesthetic reward that is rare to find in young people. But even if we do not find life less exhilarating when we are old than we did when we were young, eventually our bodies quite simply wind down and with death prevent us from experiencing at the macrolevel. The parts of our bodies, in the process of decomposing, nonetheless go on experiencing at the microscopic level. One pays an aesthetic price if one continues for very long in a debilitated state; to do so everlastingly would, in fact, lead to what Hartshorne calls monotony. Of course one can deny this whole way of looking at things if one ultimately denies (as Auxier does, at least by implication) that human persons are biological animals.
No trivial issue is at stake here. It is not the case that one can accept Hartshorne's philosophical theology and his aesthetics, but tag on at the end a doctrine of subjective immortality, without radically altering the philosophical theology and aesthetics. The key point, from Hartshorne's point of view, is that death be accepted in that without getting clear on the meaning of death we lose out on the meaning of life. And, from Hartshorne's point of view, belief in subjective immortality indicates a certain refusal to accept death.
Life is good while it lasts; it is, like virtue and aesthetic value, its own reward. Hence there is the problem of trying to make death acceptable. There are three ways to do this, Hartshorne thinks. The first is to believe, along with Suchocki and Auxier, in subjective or personal immortality. Hartshorne is quite clear about what he thinks about this option (see the above four Hartshornian criticisms): "I think that the appeal of this view is largely a consequence of misconceptions about the nature of life as such, no matter where or when" (AC, 84). Another option that makes death acceptable to some is the belief that death is like a deep sleep from which one never wakes. Hartshorne is not convinced, however, that this option really makes death acceptable. Suppose a middle-aged person in good health were told that tomorrow she would die, with the supposed consolation being that the death would be painless and would lead to a deep sleep. Would this really make her death acceptable? Hartshorne thinks not.
The third way to make death acceptable is to transcend self-interest as our final concern, to regard our lives as contributions to the good of those who survive us, whether human or non-human. Once self-interest is transcended in this way, and only when this has occurred, can death be acceptable, he thinks. Hartshorne would have us consider the following case:
Miserable people, even if they are useful, contribute less than happy people who are also useful. By giving posterity our misery to look back upon we do them no special favor. It is joys one wants to recall, more than sufferings. Even admitting the truth in the poet's phrase, "our sweetest songs are those that tell the saddest thought," still, in the composing and singing of these songs there is more than misery, there is satisfaction in the beauty of the expression of grief (AC, 84).
The insight here is directly connected to Hartshorne's aesthetic theory as we have seen it unfold throughout the present book:
[W]e are mere fragments of reality spatially and temporally. But then any work of art or beautiful thing is such a fragment, apart from the entire universe throughout time. Contentment with mortality is contentment with the finitude of our ultimate contribution to the whole of life. Should our careers have a last episode? Should a book have a last chapter? A poem, a last verse? Without beginning and end a work of art has no definite form or meaning. I personally regard a life as, with normal luck and good management, having something of the qualities of a work of art, and I see no reason why it should be endless; rather the contrary, it ought not to be endless (AC, 85).
Life is interesting, in part, because it has a beginning, middle, and end. The drastic contrasts between infancy and youth, youth and adolescence, adolescence and early adulthood, early adulthood and advanced middle age, and advanced middle age and elderliness are, in a way, crucial in the creation of a beautiful life. It is common, for example, to fixate on one period and hence to miss out on the beauty of a whole life, as in the high school sports star whose remaining years are all downhill.
Perhaps it will be objected that we ordinarily think of books and poems as complete, the exceptions being those proportionately fewer novels and poems that are left half-written. But the massive amount of suffering that has existed historically (wars, plagues, famines, high infant mortality rates, etc.) has left the majority of human beings with incomplete lives. Thus, it will be claimed that the analogy between a life and a book or a poem is flawed. 20 A critic might even go so far as to say that Hartshorne's philosophy of death is elitist in that Hartshorne had the luxury of a long life such that only he and a few like him could bring some sort of closure to it.
One reply might be to say that any analogy consists in certain similarities and dissimilarities between the two analogues such that Hartshorne's critics here are doing nothing more than pointing out an important dissimilarity between a human life and a book or poem. Something more needs to be said, however: even if it is true that most human lives have historically been cut short, it is nonetheless crucial to notice that we see these lives as tragic only because of the assumption that all human beings have a natural lifespan of seventy years or so (i.e., a complete story that ideally ought to be written). Even in antiquity, or in primitive conditions where over half the children die of disease, such an assumption is made, as in Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 1100A), who thought that happiness requires a complete life.
Satisfaction with the present stage in one's life, indeed with the present moment to the extent that this is possible, does not require everlasting future rewards as found in belief in subjective immortality. In fact, belief in subjective immortality makes it even harder to achieve aesthetic satisfaction in the present. The meaning of life can survive its termination, but only if there is a divine form of life that can appreciate and preserve the goodness and beauty of such a life. Further, the contributionist acceptance of death has implications for the theodicy problem. Premature or aesthetically repulsive or painful modes of dying are evil, but death simply as such is not:
I am deeply convinced that it is a religious mistake to ask, in case of misfortune, why did God do this to me? God is not in the business of inflicting misfortunes upon anyone. It is other creatures, for example bacteria, or human thieves or mischief-makers, that inflict misfortunes. God makes it possible for there to be a cosmic order in which creatures can live and make their own decisions....Only chance intersections of many actions by many agents can acceptably account for evils. The nontheological determinist is, in spite of himself, committed to chance, for the entire cosmic system, from which, according to him, every event is a necessary consequence, has itself no explanation and is as a whole like an immensely complex throw of the dice, with no intelligible account possible either of the dice or of the dice thrower. Chance must be admitted somewhere, but the place to admit it is everywhere, just as some aspects of order are everywhere. Quantum physics shows in principle how the two can be combined. Given certain limits to randomness (which limits I view as providential) and large numbers of similar happenings, there will then be statistical regularities, and yet each single agent can be making its own little decision (AC, 86-87).
The aesthetic satisfaction of finding a meaning in life as we live it is obviously no small accomplishment. In this sense, heaven and hell are here now in our persistent blessedness or recurrent resentments, respectively, if such exist. In any event, there is an aesthetic need for finitude (AC, 87).
Hartshorne's opposition to subjective immortality dovetails with his critique of anthropocentrism, a critique that is informed both by his theocentrism and his defense of the rights of the subhuman world:
[A]n animal ought to be mortal...mortality is intrinsically appropriate to the status of being a fragment of reality such as each of us is. We are but parts of the spatial whole of things; we are also but parts of the temporal whole. The spatial fragmentariness and the temporal belong together. To be finite or limited in time is no more an injury or insult that to be finite in space. Immortality would be appropriate only for a being coextensive with the whole of things. If there is a truly cosmic being, there may well be an immortal being; otherwise not (PD, 81; also see SH).
On this view death simply as such is not absurd, but the lack of death would be. Once again, however, on this view some deaths are absurd or ugly or immoral (e.g., as a result of murder) or tragic. Wisdom, Hartshorne thinks, consists in "making the best of what by chance comes our way" (PD, 82). Barry Whitney is likewise instructive in arguing that theodicies based on a God who has unilateral and coercive power are bound to fail because they lead people both to ask the wrong things of God and to expect more from life than is reasonable in a universe pervaded by self-movers. 21
To ask why an animal's (even a human animal's) life has to end is like asking why Brahms' Fourth Symphony has to end; if it did not end, it would not be a symphony. Hartshorne is like the Greeks in thinking that aesthetic value has a definite form or limit (peras), which is a good thing. If we lived forever our lives would lack this form or limit and would be what the Greeks called apeiron or limitless chaos. Only a being cosmic in scope could definitely handle limitless time, he thinks, but not even in this case would we find "absolute beauty," as we have seen. By contrast, each moment in our lives is a variation on the themes found in our distinct personalities. To think that a definite, fragmentary theme could have infinite variations is defective music theory, to say the least, because infinite variations on a finite or fragmentary theme would eventually produce monotony.
If it is true that life is aesthetically interesting, it is because of life-and-death, not in spite of them. The matter is, as Hartshorne sees things, "as simple as that" (PD, 83). Human beings have tried to conceal this fact or to refuse to accept death due to an understandable instinct for self-preservation. But if instinct is directed toward the concrete (this threat here and now), such instinct for self-preservation is compatible with the abstract acceptance of death simply as such, which is an object of thought. Animals (including human animals) could not survive without an instinct for self-preservation; but human animals are able to place this instinct within a larger, reticulative whole.
It is true that animals (including human animals) struggle to live out a natural lifespan, but this is quite different from trying to live forever. If biological desires have limited scope, then we have no instinct for subjective immortality, no invincible will to live forever. However, if ethics is given hegemonic power over the aesthetic, then it must be admitted that belief in subjective immortality makes some sense in that there is no ethical reason for death, especially if the good die along with the bad, as they obviously do. But if ethics grows out of aesthetic considerations, as Hartshorne thinks, the matter can be seen in a different light:
[A]ll life is a search for the golden mean between intolerably monotonous uniformity, on the one hand, and intolerably chaotic or discordant diversity on the other....Monotony is an aesthetic, not an ethical category....Life is diversification aimed at harmony....Death is the ultimate barrier between us and hopeless monotony (PD, 84).
Recent developments in genetics have led some to hope for a natural lifespan of 170 rather than 70 years. But if these developments come to fruition they would not change the metaphysical situation: 170 years is not subjective immortality. Even a 170-year old human being has to learn to appreciate life under certain limits (PD, 85).
As a result of a critique of divine omnipotence, personal experience of evil in the world, and a metaphysical analysis of being in terms of dynamic power, Hartshorne concludes that the details of the world are not arranged by divine fiat. Experiencing subjects must, to some extent at least, arrange themselves. This leads some to wonder whether we are faced with an aesthetic evil that is the opposite of monotony: confusion brought about by unbounded chaos. But there are bounds to creaturely freedom and chance, real enough as these are. Scientific probabilities, persistence of character traits, and legitimate expectations regarding the future based on past experience all attest to this. Hartshorne argues:
If anyone asks for some profound reason why just his friend, or his child, or he himself, should die prematurely, I can only say, this is how the chances came out. Life simply is a gamble, and there is no remedy for that. Does it follow that the universe is meaningless? Not at all (PD, 87).
Although we are not puppets in God's hands, on Hartshorne's view God nonetheless establishes the basic principles, statistical though they are, that govern both human and subhuman nature:
The cosmic drama is one in which the actors write the details of the dialogue and action. Only certain outlines are divine. Science searches for these outlines (PD, 87).
On this view even God is in some respects finite (e.g., in terms of concrete relations with creatures), but in no way fragmentary, a mere part of the whole of things.
Hartshorne, who died at the age of 103 while I was midway through writing this book, should have the last word:
The variety, intensity, and harmony of the divine experiences require variety, intensity, and harmony in creaturely experiences. Since no two creatures are precisely alike, deity experiences ever-new contrasts in perceiving the world; moreover, the basic order of things (the divinely imposed limitations upon creaturely freedom) insures that there will always be unity in the variety of creaturely data for the divine participation. To be is to be divinely enjoyed. In this sense do we "live and move and have our being"...in [God] (PD, 89). 22
1. On this and other matters surrounding the levels of religious discourse in Hartshorne, see Schubert Ogden, "The Experience of God: Critical Reflections on Hartshorne's Theory of Analogy."
2. See Evander Bradley McGilvary, "Space-Time, Location, and Prehension," in P.A. Schilpp, ed., The Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1941), p. 231.
3. See William Myers, "Hartshorne, Whitehead, and the Religious Availability of God," The Personalist Forum 14 (1998), pp. 170-195 .
4. Once again, see Schubert Ogden, "The Experience of God: Critical Reflections on Hartshorne's Theory of Analogy."
5. See Mohammed Valady's "Introduction" to ZF, p. xxvi.
6. See Nelson Pike, God and Evil (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp. 1-5, 85-102.
7. See William James, "The Dilemma of Determinism," in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 114-140.
8. See Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning," in The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (NY: Knopf, 1978).
9. Once again, see Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species, p. 243.
10. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, pp. 29, 60, 81, 128, 146-147, 210, 340.
11. See John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in Robert Baylor and Brenda Stokes, eds., Fine Frenzy: Enduring Themes in Poetry (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1972).
12. See my Rawls and Religion: The Case for Political Liberalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
13. See G.E.H. Palmer, et al., eds., The Philokalia (London: Faber and Faber, 1979-1995). Four of five volumes of this work have appeared in translation.
14. Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki, "Charles Hartshorne and Subjective Immortality," Process Studies 21 (1992), pp. 118-122; this quotation is on p. 118. Also see Norris Clarke, The Philosophical Approach to God: A Contemporary Neo-Thomist Perspective (Winston-Salem: Wake Forest University Press, 1979); also see Clarke's "Death and the Meaning of Life in the Christian Tradition," in Sixth International Conference on Unity of Science (NY: International Cultural Foundation, 1977), pp. 493-504.
15. See William Wordsworth's "The Tables Turned," in his Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981).
16. Randall Auxier, "Why One Hundred Years Is Forever: Hartshorne's Theory of Immortality," The Personalist Forum 14 (1998), pp. 109-132; this quotation is on p. 117.
17. Barry Whitney and J. Norman King are like Suchocki and Auxier in at least this regard: they deal (at least in this article) with the issue of subjective immortality more from the perspective of ethics (justice) rather than from the perspective of aesthetics. See their comparative essay, "Rahner and Hartshorne on Death and Eternal Life," Horizons 15 (1988), pp. 239-261.
18. On the inseparability of the mental and physical poles, see Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. 108.
19. See William Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," in Poetical Works. It is not clear that Wordsworth's view of immortality is necessarily subjective immortality, as I hope to show in a future essay.
20. See John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (NY: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 217-221.
21. See Barry Whitney, "An Aesthetic Solution to the Problem of Evil," International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 35 (1994), pp. 21-37.
22. On St. Paul, see Acts 17: 28; also see 1 Corinthians 12: 12.