1. Introduction. Daniel Dennett asks whether the stirrings of Richard Rorty's later ideas can be seen in between the lines of his "early" papers in analytic philosophy of mind. The differences between the two Rortys are encapsulated in the two different definitions found in Dennett's joke dictionary of philosophers' names. The first is that a "rort" is "an incorrigible report, hence rorty, incorrigible." The second, by way of contrast, is the adjective "a rortiori," which refers to something that is "true for even more fashionable continental reasons." Dennett rightly wonders about how Rorty went from being an author who wrote for a small coterie of analytic philosophers of mind in the early 1970s to being what Harold Bloom, say, sees as an international man of letters, indeed as the most interesting philosopher in the world! 1
One of the purposes of the present article is to push back Dennett's concerns even further to the early 1960s, when Rorty was very much interested in process philosophy, as is evidenced in his publications from this period. 2 We can analogously ask whether the stirrings of Rorty's later ideas can be seen in between the lines of his really early papers that deal with process thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead and Charles Hartshorne. This question is, at the very least, of historical significance, but Rorty's return to his critique of process thought in a 1995 response to a 1984 article by Hartshorne indicates that an understanding of the conceptual relationship between Rorty and Hartshorne is crucial for an understanding of each thinker individually. 3 Indeed, a study of the conceptual relationship between Rorty and Hartshorne is instructive regarding the problems involved in getting a fair hearing for contemporary metaphysics in that, as Rorty sees things, poetry (in the wide sense of the term he uses) trumps metaphysics.
Before examining the conceptual relationship between these two thinkers, however, the personal connection between them should not escape our notice. Rorty balances his "pull no punches" approach to Hartshorne's thought with the acknowledgment that as a nineteen year old student at University of Chicago he was both initially drawn to a career in philosophy due to Hartshorne as a teacher and as a person, and he remained as a philosophy major, despite the temptation to leave, due to Hartshorne's influence. Regarding Hartshorne as a person, it was his intellectual passion and his generosity of spirit that were especially noteworthy, according to Rorty. Further, Rorty wrote his M.A. thesis under Hartshorne on the topic of Whitehead's creativity as "the category of the ultimate." Interestingly, Rorty's characteristic emphasis on the contingent as opposed to the necessary is evident even at this early stage of his career in his claim that Whitehead's eternal objects are out of tune with the rest of Whitehead. Despite his alleged generosity of spirit, Hartshorne notes only that Rorty was a former student who became famous. 4
2. Some Important Concessions. Rorty's debt to Hartshorne, however, is not solely that of a student who continues to be appreciative of the fact that his former teacher helped him to find the right career. I have already mentioned Rorty's dissatisfaction with Whitehead's "Platonic" eternal objects, a dissatisfaction that was no doubt encouraged by Hartshorne's own criticism of this aspect of Whitehead's philosophy. As is well known, Hartshorne defends not eternal objects, but rather a theory of emergent universals. 5
There are at least three other areas where Rorty acknowledges a conceptual debt to Hartshorne and concedes Hartshorne's achievements. The most important is when Rorty, a lifelong and (by his own admission, sardonic) atheist, says that "if I could ever get myself to believe in God, it would certainly be a finite God of the sort described by Mill, James, Whitehead, and Hartshorne." 6 Of course Rorty does not believe that there really is a divine fellow-sufferer who understands, in that he thinks he "can carry on perfectly well" without one, but the fellow-sufferer who understands is the sort of being who would be a God if such a being were to exist. 7
Despite the ironic positivist sound to Rorty's view here (ironic because of Rorty's accusation that the positivists were just one more species of foundationalists and defenders of one more version of the correspondence theory of truth), his 1995 concession to Hartshorne is in evidence in his early writings as well. That is, if we ask why Rorty thinks that the process or neoclassical God is superior to that of classical theists, we can find an answer in his early essays.
Consider his 1963 essay "Matter and Event," where his criticisms of Aristotle are precisely those offered by Whitehead and Hartshorne. On Rorty's reading, Aristotle was opposed both to materialist (atomist) reductions of form to matter (see De Generatione et Corruptione, Book I, Chapter 2) as well as to Platonic reductions of matter to form (see Metaphysics, Book I, Chapter 6). Reality is unavoidably complex in the Aristotelian "hylomorphic analysis of substance." Rorty also seems to agree with Whitehead and Hartshorne in the claim that "Aristotle betrayed his own better insights when, in Metaphysics XII, he made room for the Unmoved Mover—-the perfect case of a vacuous actuality." 8 This abandonment of a unity that is internally complex has had a disastrous effect on the history of philosophic thought about God, according to the process view that Rorty endorses.
Here Rorty relies on John Herman Randall regarding what Aristotle should have said in order to maintain hylomorphism at the cosmological level, a cosmic hylomorphism that is exemplified most prominently in contemporary philosophy by Hartshorne's frequent defense of the ancient Greek (especially Plato's) concept of the World Soul: God is the soul for the body of the whole world. Does God exist totally apart from the world of moving things? Hartshorne's own response, and the response that Randall/Rorty think that Aristotle should have made in order to remain consistent to his hylomorphism, is: no. To be God is to be the living form of the world's matter, "the energeia and entelecheia of its dynameis." 9 God would be nothing if God were not the essential factor of the world, specifically the harmony of the natural ends of particular things in the world. Aristotle himself flirts with cosmic hylomorphism, even if he does not consistently defend it (Metaphysics, Book XII, Chapter 10, especially 1075A).
So also, on a consistent version of cosmic hylomorphism that avoids Rorty's aversion to both free-floating eternal objects and disembodied divine agency, God would be immanent in the world as its intelligible order even if God would also in a sense transcend the world as its ideal end. God as an Unmoved Mover (or the gods as unmoved movers) ruins this internal-external balance, however. 10
Aristotle's mistake, on Rorty's reading, a mistake remedied in Hartshorne's World Soul-oriented theism, was to make an
...illicit transition from the doctrine of form-as-the-actuality-of-the-matter to the notion of form-as-the-actuality-of-the-composite-substance. This transition evolved into the notion of form-in-isolation contributing something called "actuality" to the composite substance, whereas matter-in-isolation contributed the element of "potentiality." 11
This transition kept alive the worst aspects of "Platonism," on Rorty's view, a Platonism that Rorty has assailed throughout his career, especially in his magnum opus, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. 12 Aristotle's Unmoved Mover, with its associated "Platonic" escape from matter, is also, on Rorty's interpretation, an escape from decision-making altogether. Rorty's implied stance, by contrast, is that the greatest conceivable being, if such existed, would be the one who makes the most important and far-reaching decisions, as is the case in Hartshorne's theism, rather than a being who escapes from decision-making altogether. 13
Rorty not only favors process or neoclassical theism to the classical theism often found in the Abrahamic religions (with Aristotle's Unmoved Mover being the main predecessor to classical theism), he also seems to favor Hartshorne's version of neoclassical theism to Whitehead's because the latter's Primordial Nature of God, which contemplates the "Platonic" eternal objects, is too close to Aristotle's Unmoved Mover. There are notorious passages in Whitehead where God is seen as a non-temporal actuality, rather than as an everlasting series of divine occasions, as in Hartshorne. 14
Despite Rorty's thorough knowledge of process thought, he is not always an accurate guide in what he says about Hartshorne. For example, he compares the delight the neoclassical God takes in creation to fans of the avant garde who go to galleries to be astonished, rather than to have any particular expectation fulfilled. 15 But this trivializes divine care for the world in light of the immense suffering that human beings have experienced and continue to experience. God cares for creation not the way trendy arts enthusiasts "care for" the latest hip painter, but rather in a way appropriate to an omnibenevolent being who is moved in relation to creaturely suffering. Further, we will see that there are metaphysical reasons why a relational God cannot remain unmoved by the creatures' suffering.
The undeniable fact of human (and animal 16) suffering is one of the reasons why Hartshorne rejects belief in divine omnipotence. This suffering is largely due, on Hartshorne's view, to the presence of widespread contingency in the world and to the inadvertent clash of conflicting freedoms. Rorty gives approval to the pervasiveness of contingency in Hartshorne's philosophy, wherein there is a coincidence of real and logical possibility. "Possible worlds" are real possibilities, not merely logical ones. Possibilities that are "merely logical," on Hartshorne's view, refer either to what were real possibilities in the remote past or to what will be-—or could be-—real possibilities in the remote future. Although it is convenient to speak of merely logical possibilities, this is ultimately an inaccurate way of describing them. Although Rorty is skeptical regarding whether we could ever have such perfect command of our ideas that we could see the logical absurdity in any description that is really impossible, he agrees with Hartshorne that:
There can be no exact or ultimate "why" for the contingent. The contingent is the arbitrary, the not strictly deducible. 17
The idea that there are timeless truths (the idea most detested by Rorty) has done the greatest amount of harm, Hartshorne thinks, in religion. Indeed, Hartshorne thinks that the idea that there are time-independent truths is "downright vicious" because it encourages us to "retreat from our responsibilities by indulging in superstitious prophecies." 18 It is presumably this sort of strong language that makes Hartshorne's theism so appealing to Rorty.
Second, Rorty praises Whitehead's and Hartshorne's relationalism, which Hartshorne himself emphasizes in a phrase that is the title to one of his books: reality as social process. 19 In fact, Rorty thinks that historians of philosophy will eventually see the twentieth century as a period where a Leibnizian "panrelationalism" was developed under several different rubrics. The key idea is that each monad (however "monad" is defined) is nothing other than all the other monads seen from a certain perspective.
In non-process terms, the way to put it would be in the language of each substance being nothing but its relations to all the other substances. Whitehead's way of putting the point is to say that every actual occasion is constituted by relations to all other actual occasions. Once again, the process critique of Aristotle (specifically, the critique of Aristotle's notion of substance) is praised by Rorty even if, on Hartshorne's view, Rorty does not fully appreciate the significance of the "event standpoint." Rorty allies process relationalism with Peirce's and Russell's and Wittgenstein's separate attempts to formulate a non-subject/predicate logic and, surprisingly, with Derrida's criticism of logocentrism and with his (and Quine's) view of words as nodes in a flexible web of relationships with other words. 20
And third, in addition to supporting Hartshorne's version of neoclassical theism and his relationalism, Rorty, in his early essays at least, seems to approve of the efforts of process thinkers, including Hartshorne, in dealing with "the central task of contemporary philosophy." This task, as Rorty saw things in 1963, was to reconcile the fact that all knowledge is perspectival with "the fact that knowledge is about objects distinct from and independent of the experiencing subject." That is, the central task of contemporary philosophy, a task willingly taken up by Whitehead and Hartshorne, is to reconcile perspectivalism with realism. What the early Rorty seems to find especially helpful in process thought's "reformed subjectivist principle" is the idea that not only the subjects of knowledge, but also the objects known, can only be described in "token-reflexive terms." By token-reflexive terms Rorty means those terms that make sentences capable of different truth values depending on the circumstances in which the sentences are made. 21
Because of the need for token-reflexive terms like "this," "there," "now," "then," etc., "it is logically impossible," Rorty thinks in agreement with process thinkers, "that there should be a description of reality which is not a description from a perspective which is one among alternative perspectives." But this does not necessarily constitute a surrender to idealism. Realism is compatible with the view that "there can be no such thing as 'the complete description of reality'." The contingency of statements about temporal locations seems to be part of the very fabric not only of discourse, but of reality itself. One of the reasons why a complete description of reality is not possible is that if experience is synonymous with present experienced togetherness, then the concrete entities that make up the world are unrepeatable, in contrast to what Whitehead saw as the repeatability of the eternal objects (or to what Hartshorne calls universals).
Or at least Rorty so thought in 1963 in an essay that he still viewed (surprisingly, given his later abandonment of realism) as largely correct as late at 1995. 22 Even in the early 1960s, however, Rorty disagreed with certain aspects of process thought, most notably its effort to explicate the problematic features of knowing by reference to unproblematic features of feeling. Rorty, by contrast, explicated problematic features of knowing by reference to unproblematic features of talking. That is, on Rorty's view, there is something suspicious about a process view of intentionality that is built on the presence of one actuality in another, say through memory or perception or prehension. But at least at this early stage in his career, Rorty was not opposed to some version of intentionality when seen as "the reference of every conscious judgment to an entity capable of existing independently of that judgment." 23
It is plausible to read the really early Rorty as saying that the realism of Whitehead and Hartshorne is superior to Aristotle's realism because the former consistently take time seriously (i.e., they acknowledge the need for token-reflexive terms). Further, process thinkers are realists not only with respect to ordinary things (like Aristotle's primary substances), but also with respect to actual occasions. This inclusion of time (specifically, for Rorty, of token-reflexive terms) and of actual occasions rather than substances "permits one to save realism," according to Rorty. 24
3. Rejection of Metaphysics. Despite these three major concessions to Hartshorne, the amount of rapprochement between Rorty and Hartshorne is rather restricted. To put the point simply: Rorty is opposed to metaphysics and Hartshorne is primarily a metaphysician. But the subtleties of each thinker's position are worthy of exploration because they indicate why the contemporary controversy over metaphysics is quite different from the earlier one in the twentieth century that involved the positivists.
Rorty tells us quite explicitly that when he read one of Hartshorne's greatest books, and perhaps the most tightly written, The Divine Relativity, he was "put off by all the attempts at demonstration, all the stuff about modality, all the talk of necessary metaphysical truth." Rorty's complaint is that Hartshorne tries to mix oil and water, in effect binding the spirit of Christ to the fetters of Euclid, to use Rorty's language. 25
Despite my general defense of Hartshorne's views, and my general negativity regarding Rorty's, I must admit that Rorty is on to something here. He may very well be correct that the key tension in Hartshorne's thought that still needs careful explication is the relationship between the data of concrete religious experience and the rationalist formalism/argumentation found throughout his writings. I would like to make it clear that I do not share Rorty's assessment that Hartshorne leans too far in the direction of rationalistic metaphysics, but his locating the crucial tension in Hartshorne is no small achievement.
Rorty thinks that we are "better off without metaphysics." He describes the desire to do metaphysics in Heideggerian terms: awareness of our mortality leads us to want realities that are meta ta physica, beyond the physical ones. Whether this description fits Hartshorne, as Rorty thinks it does, is open to question when Hartshorne's repeated denial of subjective immortality is considered, as well as his repeated denial that God (the World Soul) completely transcends the physical. 26 Surely the desire to do metaphysics is not essentially connected to the desire to live on after our bodies die. But let us agree momentarily with Rorty so as to understand his line of thought. The idea seems to be that if the desire to do metaphysics is brought about by a misguided hope that we might escape death, then a solid dose of Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy will cure us of this desire. 27
The hope Rorty has is that this therapy will result in metaphysical "problems" being dissolved. When they are dissolved, both religion and science will, in turn, yield their places to poetry, to Wordsworth. But more later on religion, science, and Wordsworth. At this point in my treatment of the relationship between Rorty and Hartshorne we can see that much is at stake in Rorty's criticism of metaphysics: the demise of religion and science and the triumphal rise of Wordsworth and poetry, in general. Rorty sums up his critique of metaphysics (with special attention paid to the metaphysical dispute between freedom and determinism) in the following way:
...whereas Hartshorne thinks it important to defend indeterminism as a metaphysical truth, I think that reassurance on this metaphysical point has nothing to contribute to the development of an ever freer, more creative, more interesting culture. I agree with Hume and Kant that we are going to carry on as if we were free, regardless of whether physics is currently siding with the determinists or the indeterminists. I do not think it matters whether we accept "the essentially creative aspect of becoming" as long as we keep trying to create ever more open space for the play of the human imagination. I see cultural politics, rather than metaphysics, as the context in which to place everything else. 28
On Rorty's reading, metaphysics conceived in the Hartshornian sense consists of "the urge to find necessary truths and real modalities"—-in other words, "the urge for transcendentality"—-and is thus a result of the epistemological quest for certainty. But epistemological certainty is not attainable, according to Rorty and process thinkers alike (see above regarding Rorty's treatment of token-reflexive terms in process thought). Therefore, metaphysical truth is opposed to process philosophy itself. 29
Rorty is well aware of how radical his critique is. His anti-metaphysical stance is nothing short of an attempt to critique (or better, to reject) a philosophical tradition that goes back to Plato. By dissolving metaphysical problems through Wittgensteinian therapy applied to thinkers like Hartshorne, Rorty knows that he will be accused of being a reductionist and a relativist. He responds to these accusations by repudiating almost the entire philosophical lexicon inherited from Plato: the distinctions between finding and making, discovery and invention, objectivity and subjectivity, absolute and relative, etc. He agrees with Heidegger that metaphysics is Platonism. According to Rorty, this is precisely why Whitehead thought that the safest possible characterization of Western philosophy was that it was a series of footnotes to Plato. By rejecting metaphysics and the Platonic tradition that has so profoundly affected Whitehead and Hartshorne, Rorty hopes to start over. 30
We have seen Rorty's concession that the theistic metaphysics of process thinkers like Hartshorne is superior to alternative versions of theistic metaphysics. But this is a far cry from showing the superiority of theistic metaphysics to other ways of doing philosophy, he thinks. Consider Rorty's review of Victor Lowe's Understanding Whitehead from the early 1960s. He thinks that Lowe and Whitehead are to be praised for pointing out the "fallacy of the perfect dictionary," the belief that human beings have entertained all of the fundamental ideas regarding experience and that human language can adequately express these ideas. Scientists, at least, establish convincing criteria to determine what additions to make to this dictionary (Rorty later is more demure regarding science), but metaphysicians do not do so in any convincing way. Their best effort in this regard consists in saying that by reconceiving experience as part of a theistic metaphysics, we are able to appreciate for the first time aspects of experience that are always present, and hence are usually not the focus of attention. What is needed is a more careful comparison on the part of process thinkers of theistic metaphysics with the various anti-metaphysical views defended in contemporary philosophy. Hartshorne is better than other theistic metaphysicians in this regard, Rorty thinks, but even Hartshorne engages non-theists "only generally and vaguely." 31
Process metaphysicians have successfully reached an accommodation with Darwin, Rorty thinks, but this accomplishment is not as significant as it seems initially. All they have done, on his interpretation, is to present in temporalized language the old Platonic distinctions, especially that between "the rational pursuit of the truth by the wise and the flux of passion characteristic of the many." 32 Or again, despite the process criticisms of Aristotle noted above, process thinkers keep alive the Aristotelian notion of the identity of subject and object. And it is precisely this knowledge-as-identity thesis (like knows like) that preserves the correspondence theory of truth that the skeptic Rorty wishes to demolish. 33 (Of course to call Rorty a skeptic is to presuppose some of the old Platonic distinctions that Rorty thinks we should transcend.) Rorty's skepticism is not new. Even in the early 1960s, in some comments on a paper by Hartshorne, he indicated that the hope that we would one day know the laws of nature "seems irrelevant to our own situation," a stance that clearly paves the way for his later truth-as-coherence position. 34
It is not insignificant, according to Rorty, that at the University of Chicago Hartshorne had formed something of an alliance with Rudolf Carnap. Both shared a taste for the formal and the necessary. Rorty did not and he does not share such a taste. Rather, he cheered the publication of Quine's famous "Two Dogmas" article; and he did the same regarding Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, especially when Wittgenstein asked the question, "Why did we think that logic was something sublime?" Rorty is thus opposed to the formal and the necessary both when they are used by empiricists like Carnap and especially when they are used by metaphysicians like Hartshorne. That is, linguistic philosophy becomes more exciting when it turns away from Carnap-like formalism. Rorty's very first philosophical article was an attempt to ally Wittgenstein with another temporalistic critic of "Platonism": Peirce. But the hero here is the process Peirce of evolutionary love, in contrast to the formalistic Peirce of the logic of relatives. It makes sense that Rorty's temporalistic focus is very much compatible with, indeed it is indebted to, Hartshorne's temporalistic focus, but not with Hartshorne's formalism. 35
There is agreement between Rorty and Hartshorne that, despite Rorty's belief that scientists can more fruitfully add to the aforementioned imagined perfect dictionary than can theistic metaphysicians, most religious believers and most scientists share a common faith in the ability of human beings to think in ways that correspond with reality, a faith that Rorty lacks. Rorty is willing to dispense with the "connaturality" of ourselves with the rest of reality in large part because he does not think that connaturality is necessary in order for us to find meaning in life. In fact, Rorty sees natural science as the Enlightenment version of religion: both natural science and religion allege to put us in contact with ultimate reality:
By contrast, I tend to view natural science as in the business of controlling and predicting things, and as largely useless for philosophical purposes. Whereas Hartshorne views phenomena like quantum indeterminacy as a tip-off to metaphysical truth, I suspect that science will not converge to agreement with either panpsychists or materialists. 36
The Rortean utopia looks not toward scientists or technicians, nor toward prophets or priests, but rather to poets "as the cutting edge of civilization." Rorty sums up his view of the alliance between science and religion in the following terms:
I think the problem with religious people and scientists is that they think it important not simply to create, but to get something right. I should like to free Whitehead's Category of the Ultimate not just from the theory of eternal objects [along with Hartshorne], but from the fetters of the correspondence theory of truth, and from the idea that we need a super-science called metaphysics [contra Hartshorne]. 37 [inserts added]
The rejection of metaphysics by Rorty, it should be added, has political implications. If there is no source of obligation other than the claims of "sentient beings" (a view that should not necessarily be seen as a concession on Rorty's part to animal rightists 38), then responsibility to God or Truth or Reason should be replaced by our responsibility to each other. Theistic metaphysics is valuable, on this hypothesis, only in a utilitarian or pragmatic way wherein religious belief cultivates habits of action that further, or at least do not frustrate, the needs of other human beings. That is, theistic metaphysics can be valuable, but not because it "gets something right."
This utilitarian or pragmatic view of religion was Mill's view, as well as James', but it is obviously not Hartshorne's. The Rortean strategy here is to privatize theistic metaphysics and to allow religious believers the freedom to practice this religion as long as they do not bring claims to knowledge of the divine will into the public arena. This privatization is open not only to religious believers, but also to other "foundationalists" (Rorty's designation) who are empiricists, common sensists, etc. People have a right to faith in addition to a right to fall in love, he admits:
Pragmatist theists, however, do have to get along without personal immortality, providential intervention, the efficacy of sacraments, the Virgin Birth, the Risen Christ, the Covenant with Abraham, the authority of the Koran....Or, if they want them, they will have to interpret them "symbolically"....Demythologizing amounts to saying that, whatever theism is good for, it is not a device for predicting or controlling our environment. 39
But even science, in predicting and controlling our environment, is like religion in being what it is due to the fact that human beings have the interests they do. But "scientific realism and religious fundamentalism are products of the same urge": specifically the out of control urge to get things right. 40
This contrast between utilitarian or pragmatist philosophy of religion and fundamentalist religion is analogous, on Rorty's view, to the contrast between faith, on the one hand, and a more ambitious belief in creeds or rational proofs for the existence of God, on the other. Faith, he thinks, as opposed to belief in creeds, is, for some unexplained reason, more likely to lead to love or some other socially beneficial emotion. 41 The religious faith that Rorty tolerates is one that is conducive to our doing vast good, rather than a whimsical hope that God will do so. We do not need to, nor should we, look beyond nature to the supernatural, on Rorty's view.
Hartshorne's theistic metaphysics, however, is no more a type of supernaturalism than it is a type of religiosity that encourages or requires a belief in personal immortality, virgin birth, etc., contra Rorty. Nor is it clear how Hartshorne's (fallibilist) arguments for the existence of God make him an ally of the fundamentalists. To be precise, Rorty is opposed not only to supernatural theism (as is Hartshorne, in that God is the soul that informs the body of the natural world: the World Soul), but to any theistic metaphysics. The closest he comes to religious belief or to something ultimate is in those rare moments when he is not content with utilitarianism, nor with pragmatic coping, but yearns for validity as well. 42
It is instructive to try to get behind Rorty's meat-cleaver distinction between utilitarian (or pragmatic) philosophy of religion and fundamentalism, which he thinks roughly corresponds to the distinction between Protestantism and Catholicism, respectively, as if some Protestants were not fundamentalists and some Catholics were not familiar with symbolic or spiritual readings of scripture in the tradition of lectio divina. 43 His underlying concern is that "fundamentalist" religion is a "conversation stopper" in a liberal society were people differ regarding what Rawls calls various comprehensive doctrines, sometimes differing uncompromisingly. But whereas Rawls leaves open the possibility that a theistic metaphysics could be true and that citizens can believe in a theistic metaphysics as long as they do not violate the rights of others along the way, Rorty is convinced that such a metaphysics is a bogus hypothesis, hence it is best to have citizens privatize it. Rawls, once again by way of contrast with Rorty, notices that religious believers tend to worship in community, hence freedom of religion is not to be equated with Rortean privatization. 44
It is unclear if Rorty is correct in equating his privatization of religion with one of Whitehead's definitions of religion in Religion in the Making in terms of what we do with our solitariness. Perhaps we will choose to identify with others in a faith (or creedal) community, hence escaping privatization. Further, Rortean liberalism is different from Rawlsian liberalism to the extent that the latter, but not the former, does allow religion in the public square as long as the proviso is met that the parochial terms of one's religious belief are eventually translated into terms that any reasonable person could understand. Both Rawls and Rorty agree, however, that not much is to be gained, and much could be lost, if we debated the merits of theistic metaphysics in politics.
It should be emphasized in this regard that both Whitehead and Hartshorne were political liberals. Despite the subtle differences in their respective political stances, they were much closer to Rawls than to Rorty regarding the points discussed in the previous two paragraphs, especially because of Rorty's rejection of the possibility that a theistic metaphysics could be true and, in Hartshorne's case, because of a willingness to avoid parochial language and neologisms such that any reasonable person can understand what he is trying to get at in his theistic metaphysics. 45
To sum up what has been argued thus far: there are several important concessions made by Rorty to Hartshorne, most notably the cogency of Hartshorne's critique of Whitehead's eternal objects; the admission that Hartshorne has offered the most defensible version of theistic metaphysics to date, a superiority that relies largely on Hartshorne's critique of Aristotle's doctrines of substance and of God as an unmoved mover; the attractiveness of Hartshorne's thoroughgoing relationalism; and finally the admirable way in which process thinkers in general try to deal with what Rorty saw (in 1963) as the central task of contemporary philosophy, which is the reconciliation of perspectivalism with realism.
However, we have also seen that Rorty is critical of metaphysics, in general, and hence of Hartshorne's philosophy, in particular. He sees in the desire to do metaphysics a desire to escape death, a longing that is in need of philosophical (Wittgensteinian) therapy. More importantly, Rorty (correctly, I think) sees the basic tension in Hartshorne's philosophy as that between concrete, contingent experience (including religious experience) and knowledge of the formal and necessary. He claims (incorrectly, I hope to show below) that Hartshorne overemphasizes the formal and the necessary. This overemphasis, Rorty thinks, leads Hartshorne, despite his wishes, to both aim at epistemological certainty and ignore certain non-theistic views, although Rorty admits that Hartshorne does a better job of engaging non-theists than most theistic metaphysicians. Finally, according to Rorty, Hartshorne's theistic metaphysics has political implications that are dangerous: we are encouraged (despite Hartshorne's repeated critiques of supernaturalism) to think that a supernatural God will solve our problems for us, rather than being encouraged to solve them ourselves.
4. A Hartshornian Response. It must be admitted at the outset that any interpreter of Hartshorne is confronted with the tension in his thought between the experiential/contingent and the formal/necessary, as Rorty correctly notes. To take just one example, consider what he says about the role of religious experience in his view of God. In Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (1984) he pointed out the implausibility in every other area of life of a thoroughgoing egalitarianism with respect to degree of skill or insight. Some people play the piano better than others, construct houses better than others, shoot a jump shot better than others, etc. Why not in religion, too? Some individuals seem to have clearer, deeper, and more authentic religious insights and experiences than others: Jesus, Moses, Mohammed, for starters, but also the Buddha, Lao Tse, Confucius, Zoroaster, Sankara, Teilhard de Chardin, Teresa of Avila, Mary Baker Eddy, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Black Elk, and Thomas Merton. The list could be extended quite a bit.
None of these "experts" in religious experience are infallible, as Hartshorne sees things (which works against Rorty's claim that there is an implicit drive toward epistemological certainty in Hartshorne), but it is not implausible that these individuals be seen as authoritative in some sense. By way of contrast, in a posthumously published article that appeared in 2002 (written in 1987), Hartshorne sings a slightly different tune, or at least he sings the same tune in a different pitch. He says not only that he personally has not had the sort of experiences that the religious mystics have claimed to have, but also that his faith relies primarily on metaphysical arguments. 46 It is precisely this sort of language that plays into Rorty's claim regarding the overemphasis of the formal/necessary in Hartshorne.
Taken in isolation, there is no doubt that there are comments in Hartshorne's writings that support Rorty's judgment. But a reticulative effort to understand Hartshorne's philosophy as a whole makes Rorty's judgment problematic. Consider the fact that two of Hartshorne's many books are themselves works in the empirical sciences: The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1934) in psychology and Born to Sing (1973) in ornithology. 47 Or again, Hartshorne, in his 1929 review of Heidegger's Being and Time (the very first review of it in the English language), rejects the abstractness of Husserl's phenomenology and claims that Heidegger was less likely than Husserl to describe experience in terms of abstract phenomena like consciousness or intentionality, and more likely to describe it in terms of more concrete phenomena like feeling, willing, valuing, desiring, loving, and hating.
In this regard, Hartshorne thinks that the American pragmatists are even more successful than Heidegger. The specific achievement of the pragmatists, on this view, is their ironic critique of the British empiricists as not being sufficiently empirical. Hartshorne would have us turn the tertiary qualities of the British empiricists (e.g., color sensations, desires, etc.) into the primary ones. The primary qualities of the British empiricists (e.g., extension) are highly abstract and are ultimately derived from our experience of the "tertiary" ones. 48. In short, there is much evidence from Hartshorne's writings that militates against Rorty's claim that the formal/necessary dominate his philosophy.
None of what I have said thus far is meant to hide the crucial role for the formal/necessary in Hartshorne's philosophy. He thinks that three alternatives exhaust the logical possibilities: (1) there are no necessary truths; (2) there are necessary truths, but we cannot in principle know them; and (3) there are necessary truths and it makes sense for us to try to know them. Alternative (1), Hartshorne thinks, means not only that "necessary" has no application, but also that both this term and "contingent" lose their meaning. That is, the two terms are correlative and can only be defined in terms of each other. Likewise, if (2) is correct we have huge problems in that, on this alternative, when we speak not only of necessary truths, but also of contingent truths, we would not know what we are talking about, again on the Hartshornian assumption that "necessary" and "contingent" are correlative terms. 49
Alternative (3) is the most credible position, Hartshorne thinks, not only because it points us toward those features that would have to be found in any possible world (necessary truths), but also because it helps us to secure an understanding of the contingent. Necessary truths have gotten a bad name, he thinks, due to certain mistakes that have plagued the history of philosophy. One of these is the assumption that necessary truths have to concern (Boethian) eternal realities that are outside of time altogether, rather than everlasting realities that endure through all of time. Hartshorne's view, contra Rorty, is that "the eternal" is so abstract that it cannot have relations with (at least not internal relations with) that which becomes. Another mistake that has given necessary truths a bad name concerns a confusion between the necessity of a proposition and our knowledge of it. Our knowledge of a necessary truth, if we have such, is not itself necessary, as some like Rorty have mistakenly supposed.
A third mistake is the dangerous assumption that if one does know necessary truth one can then deduce contingent truths from the necessary ones. But this would end not only creaturely creativity, but process itself. Even with knowledge of necessary truths under one's belt one would still have to await the outcome of contingent events, Hartshorne thinks. It is one thing to know that a decision (literally, a cutting off of possibilities) must be made, another to know which decision. 50
If God's knowledge of the creatures, for example, is a type of prehension, a feeling of the creatures' feelings, then it would not be possible for God to know the future feelings of creatures if they depend on (at least partially) free decisions not yet made. Aristotle's view of the issue in his famous sea battle example seems to have been that propositions concerning future contingents are neither true nor false, but indeterminate. The main flaw of this view, which Hartshorne found attractive in the 1930s, is that it violates the law of excluded middle.
From the 1940s until his death, however, Hartshorne held a different view wherein this law is not violated. The indeterminacy of the future is to be represented not in the truth value of propositions, but in three different predicates relating to the future itself (de re modality, rather than de dictu). For example, for any event causal conditions either require it (will be), exclude it (will not be), or leave it undecided (may or may not be). These three alternatives exhaust the logical possibilities. If any one of these is true of the event, the other two are false, hence the preservation of the law of excluded middle. The region of "may or may not be" is quite large in Hartshorne's philosophy, even for God, and cannot be reduced to "will be" or "will not be" merely by virtue of knowledge of some truths that are necessary. 51
Hartshorne asks why we should give up "all efforts to satisfy" an understandable curiosity to decipher the necessary aspects of reality, "in contrast and relation to which the contingent and emergent aspects alone have their full sense and definition." The word "all" indicates that Hartshorne's appeal to the formal/necessary is by no means unbridled, as Rorty suggests. In any event, Hartshorne admits that Rorty is a thinker of great subtlety and that, because universal agreement is not possible in any discipline within philosophy, including metaphysics, our efforts to persuade each other of what we take to be necessary truths has a quasi-Rortean character to them. 52
But this does not mean that we should succumb to Rorty's (Quine-like and Wittgenstein-inspired) belief that the modal distinction between the necessary and the contingent has nothing to do with the universe and everything to do with our own practices. Rorty correctly notes that Hartshorne sides with Saul Kripke and David Lewis in believing in real modalities that are not solely functions of epistemic practices. Rorty's siding with Quine and Wittgenstein in this matter is due to his underlying belief (if the foundational metaphor can be allowed) that "human history" is "the measure of all things." Human history, he thinks, is, on the one hand, a "swelling, unfinished poem" and, on the other, an "ultimate context." That is, metaphysics or religion or science are not the ultimate contexts. 53 We should note at this point that Rorty is here rejecting not only theistic metaphysics, but also any sort of environmental stance that calls into question the anthropocentric dogma that human beings and their history are the central realities in the world.
It should be emphasized that Hartshorne's attempts to defend belief in necessary truths are not to be equated with either the quest for dogmatic certainty in epistemology or with essentialism. These attempts reflect a Popperian opposition to what Rorty says about some sort of integral connection between the presence of the formal/necessary and essentialism. Hartshorne responds to Rorty as follows:
Is human thinking a mirror of nature? If what is meant by mirror is a medium reflecting with absolute distinctness and precision, then of course the human mind is no mirror. (Nor is an ordinary mirror that.) But if the criteria for mirroring are suitably relaxed, why is one's mind not analogously a mirror? I find no very impressive argument in Rorty on this point. Consider a geographical map. It is not a correspondent to its region with infinite precision or without qualification. But it is roughly, and for some purposes sufficiently, thus correspondent. 54
This view is, in a peculiar way, Popperian precisely because it involves commitment to the belief that, even if we cannot capture the essences of things, nor can we capture the essence of God, we can nonetheless eliminate erroneous views concerning God and the creatures. Hartshorne's lifelong criticisms of classical theism and of the metaphysics of changeless being are prime examples of such error elimination. In effect, we can back our way into a picture of the world that is "more nearly correspondent with the realities." 55 It will be remembered that this effort to reconcile perspectivalism, with its falsification capabilities, with realism was what Rorty admired in process philosophy in 1963 before he equated any sort of commitment to realism both with essentialism and with the view of philosophy as an ultra-precise mirror of nature.
Hartshorne states his contrasting view succinctly:
The two extremes—-we know exactly what things are, and we know nothing of what they are—-are both unjustified. If Rorty's view is not the second extreme, it is not easy to see the distinction. Some people set great store by the goal of not believing too much, others on not believing too little. Here, as everywhere, I am chronically a moderate and distrust extremes. My admiration for Popper arises partly from his avoidance of at least many extremes. In distrust of metaphysics he is less extreme than the positivists but still too extreme for my taste. 56
Here we can see a major difference between Popper's de-emphasis (but not elimination) of metaphysics and Rorty's utter disdain for this discipline. Popper is at least committed to the project of getting things right, to use Rorty's language, or at least to the project of not getting them wrong, and he is willing to consult metaphysicians when they enable us to make progress in this effort, e.g., when they facilitate further investigation on the part of scientists by providing them a roadmap of the conceptual terrain. 57 Rorty, by way of contrast, rejects metaphysics as part of a general eschewal of the project of getting things right. Once again, he thinks of intellectual history not as an asymptotic approach to the truth, but as:
...a long, swelling, increasingly polyphonic poem—-a poem that leads up to nothing save itself. When the species is extinct, "human nature's total message" will not be a set of propositions, but a set of vocabularies—-the more, and the more various, the better. 58
The temperance of Hartshorne's approach to necessary truths can be seen in the fact that it is fallibilist in following Whitehead's famous metaphor in Process and Reality, where the true method of discovery is like the flight of a plane, starting from the ground of observation, taking flight in the air of imaginative generalization, and then landing for renewed observation and rational criticism. 59 Rorty can bring Hartshorne within the sweep of his critique of metaphysics only with the aid of caricature. He says that Hartshorne, along with Carnap, believes that everything that we do takes place "within an eternal, unchangeable framework" that we come in contact with via "an ideal language that pictures the way reality is in itself." 60
Or again, Rorty seems to think that Hartshorne continues the tradition that started with the ancient Greeks in believing that "nothing would ever change" because time was not worth taking seriously. 61 Not only is this an inaccurate summary of Hartshorne's asymmetrical view of time—-wherein the past is already settled, but the future is yet to be determined, such that time has to be taken seriously—-it also omits those aspects of Greek philosophy that prepared the way for Whitehead's and Hartshorne's process philosophies, most notably the gignolatry of Heraclitus and the later dialogues of Plato, where being is defined in terms of dynamic power (dynamis—-Sophist 247E), and soul is defined in terms of self-motion (Phaedrus 245C, Laws X). 62
Finding necessary truths is not the same as escaping from time and history. We have seen that Hartshorne prefers the term "everlastingness" to "eternity," and if the latter terms is used (rarely) he makes it clear that he is referring to the most abstract aspects of cosmic history and of becoming. Ultimacy is to be found not in an eternal region outside of time, but in the ubiquity of creativity, even at the microscopic level. Our knowledge of the ultimate, however, is not itself ultimate. Hartshorne's snappy way to put the point is to say that: "If we manage to arrive at a correct view of the necessary, this is a contingent achievement." 63 Just as mistakes can occur in a highly abstract discipline like mathematics, they can also be made in metaphysics. Only God can have infallible knowledge of necessary truths. We are likely to make mistakes, especially by way of omission. In this regard Hartshorne's philosophy can be seen as changing the classical tradition of metaphysics by way of addition. Concepts like "being" and "absoluteness" were insightfully explored by classical theistic metaphysicians, but not broader terms like "becoming" and "relationality." God, he thinks, is immutably mutable, the greatest conceivable being who forever becomes.
Douglas Pratt puts the point as follows: "Hartshorne appears almost Hegelian in his desire for a higher synthesis by which his concept of God embraces both the thesis of classical theism and many of those views and positions which are normally taken to be antithetical to it." 64 Conceptual change by way of addition is not to be confused with "foundationalism," the term Rorty so often uses and which Hartshorne so often avoids. Indeed, Hartshorne insists that neither he nor Whitehead are foundationalists in that "foundations" are sought by philosophers who are primarily interested in the problems invented by philosophers, rather than by the problems and experiences of human beings, including religious problems and religious experiences. But it is not enough to respond to these problems by "coping, merely coping" in that even insects cope quite well, Hartshorne notices. The question is: how close does our coping get us to an accurate and aesthetically satisfying view of reality, including divine reality? 65
Nonetheless, we should not give up on the possibility of some sort of rapprochement between Rorty and Hartshorne, as section 2 of the present article indicates. In the debate between Hartshornian/Whiteheadian/Popperian realism and Rortean anti-realism, we should notice that the former includes elements of correspondence and coherence theories of truth, as carefully argued by Paul Nancarrow. 66 Rorty is correct that in some sense social practices come before ideas, as in the airplane metaphor from Whitehead mentioned above, but this is a far cry from claiming, as Rorty does, that ideas are merely rhetorical ornaments. That is, some ideas enable us not only to cope better, but also to better avoid inaccurate descriptions of the world. Of course Rorty's response to the process view is that because we can never grasp what is out there really apart from our concepts and words, there is no foundation or even independent viewpoint from which we can compare our concepts and words with reality. We only have the concepts and words, he thinks. Objectivity is nothing but intersubjectivity, on this view. 67
Nancarrow's generous and perceptive summary of Rorty's view is as follows:
For the anti-realist...the proposition "There is a mountain over there" is true when in some way "it pays" to speak in that manner, when asserting the proposition results in increased convenience or effectiveness or social utility or intersubjective agreement. To be sure, one of the things it pays to say about mountains is that they are there even when we're not making propositions about them; but the reason it pays has nothing to do with the mountain, but with the coherence of the propositions, the usefulness of the talking, the rules of the language-game in which "the mountain" is involved. 68
Process thought can reach some sort of rapprochement with Rorty's view by articulating a certain compatibility between the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory, by providing a middle path between simple-minded realism (a realism that illegitimately rejects perspectivalism, as Rorty rightly emphasizes) and an anti-realism even more radical that Rorty's (although Rorty can be saved from this extreme stance only by appeal to his 1963 desire to reconcile perspectivalism and realism). This compatibility can be seen when a certain proposition like "There is a mountain over there" (to use Nancarrow's example) coheres with other experiences of the perceiver and when the experienced mountain to some degree corresponds with what is objectively present in the world at the time of the experience.
Process realism is not simple-minded precisely because of the relationality in process thought that Rorty commended in his early years. Rather than realistic portraiture, Whitehead and Hartshorne offer us interpretive abstraction. The mountain, on Nancarrow's analysis of process thinkers, is an abstraction from a richer, more detailed field of social relations. The proto-experiences at the microscopic level found in rocks, for example, may feel the strain of glacial ice on one part of the mountain more immediately than they do the feeling of being part of the mountain as a whole. Likewise, for some incipient experiences at the microscopic level in rocks (but not the rock as a whole, which, lacking a central nervous system, is insentient) there may be feelings of relatedness with reality more general than the mountain, as in the vague feeling of being part of a tectonic plate that stretches across continents. The concept "mountain" is highly abstract and can be seen as supporting many other societies. To speak simply of "the mountain" is to omit a great deal of detail. This is not the sort of realism that Rorty rejects because a proposition (about the mountain, say) does not so much picture its subject as it interprets it. 69
Nancarrow is correct to suggest that whereas Rorty forces a choice between truth-as-correspondence and truth-as-coherence, process thinkers like Whitehead and Hartshorne include both of them as parts of a thoroughly relational (i.e., non-foundational) view of the world. The ideal is some sort of reflective equilibrium or harmony between the two such that when coherence is lost we begin to wonder whether our theories really do tell us about the way things are; and when our ideas are resisted by the world we begin to wonder why most of us hold on to them. But if we are given the forced choice between the two by Rorty, many thinkers are rightly tempted to choose truth-as-correspondence over truth-as-coherence because of a legitimate fear that our intellectual contact with the real world would otherwise be lost, thereby giving the impression that they are simple-minded realists. The wise move, however, is to resist the forced choice. 70
The mountain may support (as in the aforementioned glacial ice), or be supported by (as in the aforementioned plate tectonics), an indefinite number of interrelated societies, such that "the mountain" is itself an abstraction from them. But this does not mean that the mountain is caused by the percipient, nor that the mountain is an "artifact of the percipient's language-games," to use Nancarrow's characterization of Rorty's position. As before, propositions about the mountain are true not when they accurately picture it, but when they accurately interpret it in light of its place in various nested societies that are interrelated. I think that this is the best way to understand Hartshorne's (and Popper's) example of the relative accuracy of geographic maps. Interpretive accuracy, however, should not be seen solely in cognitive terms in that propositions, for Hartshorne as well as for Whitehead, are also lures for feeling. It may very well be that the truth of a proposition depends on its correspondence to reality from some interpretive standpoint or other, but its importance requires its coherence with what gives us enjoyment and with our other purposes. 71
In fact, it seems that truth is to be valued because it contributes to the adaptation of our experiences, to their harmonization in a beautiful life. Whitehead went so far as to say that "a true proposition is more apt to be interesting than a false one" and that "Truth matters because of Beauty." 72 Even if there is something hyperbolic in the way that Whitehead makes this latter point, the general insight here that aesthetic concerns impinge on epistemological and ethical ones is enough to cast into doubt Rorty's claim that we must choose between truth-as-correspondence and truth-as-coherence, between truth as traditionally understood and importance, and between epistemology/metaphysics and aesthetics, respectively. Nonetheless the partial subservience of truth (as correspondence) to beauty (conceived as the mutual adaptation and harmonization of the different elements of experience) in process thought can be seen as analogous to Rorty's claim that correspondence is secondary to coherence. So far, so good. Unfortunately, Rorty attenuates the secondary status of truth-as-correspondence to the vanishing point. 73
Rorty is correct, from a Hartshornian point of view, that we talk about mountains because it pays to do so in terms of: aesthetic enhancement of our experience ("The mountain is sublime at dusk"), the fulfillment of ethical responsibilities ("Clearcut logging of the mountain ought to be resisted"), and the fostering of intersubjectivity ("We can all share in the grandeur of the mountain"). 74 But all of these are only possible because of the fact that there is a mountain. As Nancarrow puts the point: success in the pattern of correspondence eventually leads to "a new accession of coherence," which makes the pattern more sophisticated, in turn leading to greater success at correspondence, etc. Scientific "revolutions" in the short run should not prevent us from noticing with a wide-angle lens this interplay between the correspondence and coherence aspects of truth, an interplay entirely absent in the later Rorty, 75 although present in the early Rorty where creative process is seen as the stage for deciding which abstract possibilities will be actualized in the real world so as to produce "the greatest subjective intensity of enjoyment." 76
Despite Rorty's explicit rejection of metaphysics, he is like many analytic philosophers in adopting an implicit metaphysical materialism. On this point Hartshorne finds Rorty to be either "crude or dogmatic" in that science, which Rorty sees as our only guide to the natural world, has moved away from the classical view in physics of absolute laws governing a reductionistic materialist world. Scientists now indicate that chance is a real factor in all process such that valid scientific laws are not absolute but statistical in character. As is well known, Hartshorne defends a version of panpsychism. Not so well known is the fact that Hartshorne does not deny, as Rorty alleges he denies, that neural processes are physical events. The question, once dualism is rejected (both Rorty and Hartshorne are in favor of such a rejection), is whether physical events are best described in terms of inert, lifeless, completely determined material stuff (an implicit metaphysics that leaves the world as unintelligible as it is found, according to Peirce) or in terms of active singulars, partially self-moving pulses of physical activity, which enable us to understand both causal regularity and the chance elements in nature. 77
Panpsychism (or psychicalism, as Hartshorne labels it) is not the view that psyche is a special kind of reality, but rather that it just is reality itself. Psyche here refers not necessarily to mind or soul, but to Platonic self-motion of some sort that is not always conscious of itself as such. Nor is panpsychism the view that the "mental" and the "physical" are two aspects of the same reality, as Rorty alleges. There are two problems with Rorty's interpretation here. First, this sounds more like Spinoza than Hartshorne. And second, "psyche" is a much broader term than "mind" (although it includes mind) that refers to any sort of proto-sentient soul/mind/experience, even that found in subatomic particles. As Hartshorne puts the point:
It is mind that knows (other) mind, experience that discloses (other) experience. Mere matter is an empty negation that explains nothing. 78
Of course a teapot, to use Hartshorne's example, does not experience anything as a whole, but "the molecules and atoms into which physics analyzes teapots are not nearly so different in certain essential respects" from experiences, in general, nor from us, in particular. 79
Hartshorne thinks that Peirce was the discoverer of the statistical notion of causal order, with little help from the scientists of his day outside of those working on the kinetic theory of gases. Since the advent of quantum mechanics, however, this view of causal order is more widely accepted. 80 If causal order were absolute, then real possibilities regarding the future would be paradoxical. In fact, on this basis "possibility" would presumably refer merely to our ignorance of what was already in the cards. At the other extreme, if there were no causal order at all, "the entire...realm of the thinkable could also be really available for tomorrow's happenings." 81 But then the words "real possibility" would lose their usefulness. In fact, thinking itself would lose its usefulness because no intelligent preparation for the future would make any sense because anything could happen next. The view that does make sense is the intermediate, pragmatist one (but not Rorty's version of pragmatism, with its implicit materialist metaphysics) wherein "causal laws are limited to an approximate or statistical validity." 82
In short:
Deny causality, and the tiny range of the causally available possibilities for the immediate future instantly expands into the featureless immensities of the merely logically possible. Assert absolute or classical determinism, and the "range" of available possibilities is no longer even a range, but shrinks to a point, one uniquely definite possibility for each region of space-time....Law and chance are twin aspects of real modality, and neither is ever found alone. 83
Strictly speaking, there are no such things as future events, only possibilities or probabilities for future becoming. Rorty's flirtation with materialism leads one to wonder whether he should, in order to be consistent, also flirt with determinism in that it is not clear what the sources of freedom or creaturely escape from material regularity would be. 84
By contrast, Hartshorne is quite explicit regarding his own rejection both of reductionistic materialism and of determinism:
"Possibility" is creativity in its forward or productive aspect; "actuality" is the same in its backward or preservative aspect. Logical modalities express the ways in which creatures may understand their situations as heirs of a definite past and as contributors to future creatures which are definite in advance only with respect to the contributions that will be at their disposal. 85
5. Summary. In sum, a Hartshornian response to Rorty would include acknowledgement that Rorty has pinpointed a crucial tension in Hartshorne's metaphysics between the empirical/contingent and the formal/necessary. (In fact, this may be a crucial tension in any metaphysical view.) But it is not clear, as Rorty alleges, that Hartshorne has overemphasized the formal/necessary. Although certain isolated passages in Hartshorne admittedly support Rorty's conclusion, a reticulative effort to understand these passages in the context of Hartshorne's entire philosophy militates against Rorty's negative judgment. Hartshorne is convinced that one of the main reasons whey we should take necessary truths seriously is that without them we would not be able to understand the concept of contingency, and the loss of contingent truths brought into existence with the passage of time would be nothing short of disastrous. That is, Hartshorne has no desire to repeat Descartes' mistake of relegating contingent, historical truths to the fanciful imaginations of knights-errant as in tales of chivalry. 86
Further, knowledge of necessary truths would not enable us to deduce knowledge of contingent truths, as Rorty alleges. In order to obtain the latter we have to wait to find out which among several alternative possibilities become actualized in that necessary truths concern only the most abstract features of reality, not the concrete details upon which much of live depends (as in whether or not a loved one will survive a difficult operation tomorrow). Hartshorne is opposed, however, to Rorty's latter-day Protagoreanism wherein human history is the measure of all things; he resists any sort of anthropocentrism by way of his theistic metaphysics (his theocentrism) as well as his defense of animals and the rest of nature.
There are also good reasons to resist Rorty's equating necessary truths with dogmatic certainty concerning such truths. Hartshorne's philosophy is fallibilist in the tradition of the American pragmatists and in conformity with Whitehead's famous airplane metaphor at the beginning of Process and Reality. Likewise, belief in necessary truths is not to be equated with essentialism, as Rorty incorrectly assumes. Hartshorne maintains a Popper-like view wherein we asymptotically try to get things right, or at least try not to get them wrong, without succumbing to essentialism. The overall point is that the effort to know necessary truths is not concomitant with an effort to escape from time and history. Hartshorne would not be a process philosopher if he thought that nothing would ever change, contra Rorty. This is why Hartshorne's preference is to refer to God's existence as everlasting rather than as eternal in that the latter designation is often assumed to involve a Boethian escape from time and history. Nonetheless, Hartshorne's view is not so much meant to replace classical theism as to change it by way of a principle of addition in that divine immutability is part of the story that must be preserved: God is immutably mutable.
Hartshorne's philosophy is motivated not by a search for foundations, as Rorty alleges, but by a search for adequate responses to human problems, especially religious and metaphysical problems. Such responses involve more than mere coping in that they also involve the effort to achieve the most accurate and aesthetically satisfying view possible. This accuracy and aesthetic satisfaction are best achieved by appeal to both the correspondence and coherence theories of truth, which mutually correct each other until some sort of reflective equilibrium between the two is reached. In different terms, propositions do not simply or naively depict so much as they interpret. Or yet again, our goal should be not so much realistic portraiture, as accurate (or at least error eliminating) and aesthetically satisfying interpretive abstractions.
As we asymptotically approach truth we should also be concerned with importance, the latter of which involves aesthetic considerations. However, the partial subservience of truth-as-correspondence to beauty should not be pushed to the point where this view of truth vanishes altogether, as in Rorty's later philosophy. And this despite the fact that Rorty does adopt an implicit metaphysical materialism, which Hartshorne rejects along with what he sees as its concomitant: determinism.
6. Epilogue: Wordsworth. I would like to end by making clear the meaning of the title of the present article. We have seen that Rorty refers to human history, in contrast to the region of "eternal" truth that he opposes, as a vast poem. This is a clue that indicates that the word "poetry" and its cognates is used in a wide sense in Rorty so as to include even the conversations constructed by "the much-footnoted Plato," if not the metaphysical claims made in these conversations. In response to William James, Rorty distinguishes between two sorts of poetry: (a) one that involves a Whitmanesque expansion of the wider self so as to glimpse "the farthest reach of the democratic vistas"; and (b) another that includes a Wordsworthian "over-belief" in something "far more deeply interfused with nature than the transitory glory of democratic fellowship." Admittedly, the options presented by these two romantic poets—-Whitman and Wordsworth—-are not exactly those of atheism and theistic metaphysics, respectively. If these were the choices presented to us, however, Rorty would obviously choose Whitmanesque atheism and Hartshorne would choose Wordsworthian theism. 87
Both Rorty and Hartshorne are admirers of Wordsworth, even if there is a difference of opinion between them regarding how to assess Wordsworth's contribution. Hartshorne finds Wordsworth helpful in the effort to articulate metaphysical positions like panpsychism and theism. Regarding the former, he agrees with Wordsworth that with effort we can see "into the life of things". 88 And regarding theism Hartshorne finds Wordsworth's language of something being "far more deeply interfused" into nature extremely helpful. Rorty is thankful that Hartshorne alerted him to this moving passage in Wordsworth while he was an undergraduate:
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused. 89
But it is the poetry of Wordsworth, stripped of all metaphysical claims, that he loves. Hartshorne's Wordsworth, he alleges, is mixed in with logical proofs of necessary truths, which Rorty thinks is like mixing oil and water or like combining the spirit of Grasmere Lake with that of Whitehead's and Russell's Principia Mathematica. 90
Because Rorty is skeptical as to whether we could ever know the way things are in themselves, we have no way of knowing whether Democritus or Lucretius or J.J.C. Smart, on the one hand, or Wordsworth or Whitehead or Hartshorne, on the other, are more likely to help us reach the goal of an accurate description of the way things are.
But I think that one would be correct to suspect a stacked deck here. Rorty is quick to state that we ought not to choose between competing metaphysical schemes at least in part because "convergence to a single set of metaphysical or religious opinions" is not even desirable. But why is such a convergence undesirable, one might ask, as long as it is not the result of coercion? Both Whitehead and Hartshorne were political liberals, it should be remembered, and shared many of Rorty's political goals regarding the importance of freedom and emancipation from political servitude, poverty, and ignorance. 91
In effect, Rorty thinks that Wordsworth does not need to be backed up by metaphysical arguments. Presumably, when we read Wordsworth say that:
The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there. 92
we need not think about what sort of feelings Wordsworth has in mind. Hartshorne, by way of contrast, is interested in this topic, which he thinks is at the core of what Wordsworth is writing about. He has us notice that Wordsworth has the pleasure in the twigs, not in the tree as a whole, which, lacking a central nervous system, is not sentient as a whole. It is a metaphysical democracy, to use Whitehead's language. That is, the "twigs" are metaphors for the microscopic constituents of the tree. Likewise, Rorty is not led to think about divinity in the "far more deeply interfused" character of nature. As he succinctly puts the point simultaneously regarding the supremacy of Whitehead and Hartshorne as metaphysicians, yet the overall poverty of metaphysics:
I think of metaphysicians as footnotes to poets....I think that, as footnotes to Wordsworth go, Whitehead and Hartshorne write the best ones. But I prefer Wordsworth unfootnoted. 93
Rather than participating in the life of things, Rorty wants to participate in the life of Wordsworth. To see the contrast in another way, consider the following from Rorty:
Hartshorne wants to make the world safe for Wordsworth metaphysically, and I want to do the same thing metaphilosophically. He wants to argue that some of what Wordsworth said is literally, philosophically, metaphysically true—-that Wordsworth got something right. I want to argue that we can get the most out of Wordsworth by not asking whether he got anything right. 94
On this basis, the title of the present article seems appropriate: the ultimate dispute between Rorty and Hartshorne concerns the split between poetry (as Rorty uses the term) and metaphysics. However, one cannot help but wonder about what is left of Wordsworth when the life of things is turned into a lifeless abstraction and when the something "far more deeply interfused" into matter is exorcised. By excising the very things that animated Wordsworth, both he and his life's work are left as inanimate shells of their former "glory in the flower." 95
"We murder to dissect," as Wordsworth famously put it. 96 It is ironic that an elegant writer like Rorty has misunderstood both metaphysics and poetry.
Notes
1. See Daniel Dennett, "The Case for Rorts," in Robert Brandon, ed., Rorty and His Critics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 91.
2. See four publications, in particular: (a) "Matter and Event," in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 1963), pp. 497-524, a revised version of which appears in Lewis Ford and George Kline, eds., Explorations in Whitehead's Philosophy (NY: Fordham University Press, 1983), pp. 68-103; (b) "Comments on Professor Hartshorne's Paper," Journal of Philosophy 60 (Oct. 10, 1963), pp. 606-608; (c) "Review of Understanding Whitehead, by Victor Lowe," Journal of Philosophy 60 (Apr. 25, 1963), pp. 246-251; and (d) "The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn," in George Kline, ed., Alfred North Whitehead: Essays on His Philosophy (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963), pp. 134-157.
3. Hartshorne's article "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," first appeared in Creativity in American Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), pp. 252-264; this article was reprinted in Herman Saatkamp, ed., Rorty & Pragmatism (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), pp. 16-28, and it is this version that I will be citing in the present article. Rorty's "Response to Charles Hartshorne" is also found in the Saatkamp volume, pp. 29-36.
4. See Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," pp. 29, 36. Also see Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. xiii. Finally, see Hartshorne's The Darkness and the Light (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 233.
5. See Lewis Ford, ed., Two Process Philosophers (Tallahassee, FL: American Academy of Religion, 1973). Also see my "Hartshorne and Plato," in Lewis Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1991), pp. 465-487, 703-704.
6. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 29—-emphasis added. Also see Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope (NY: Penguin, 1999), p. 163. Rorty mistakenly identifies Hartshorne's God as finite, whereas Hartshorne believes in the more complex view that God is infinite or everlasting in existence and finite in actuality (i.e., in the mode of divine existence in real relation with finite creatures).
7. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 34.
8. Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 507.
9. See John Herman Randall, Aristotle (NY: Columbia University Press, 1960), pp. 143-144. Randall is treated by Rorty in "Matter and Event," pp. 504, 507. Also see my "Taking the World Soul Seriously," Modern Schoolman 69 (1991), pp. 33-57.
10. See John Herman Randall, Aristotle, pp. 143-144. Also see Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 502.
11. Rorty, "Matter and Event," pp. 509-510.
12. See my "Rorty on Plato as an Edifier," in Peter Hare, ed., Doing Philosophy Historically (Buffalo: Prometheus, 1988), pp. 73-84.
13. Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 512. Here Rorty cites Hartshorne's "The Compound Individual," in Otis Lee, ed., Philosophical Essays for Alfred North Whitehead (NY: Longmans Green, 1936), pp. 193-220.
14. See Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 519.
15. See Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 28.
16. See my Hartshorne and the Metaphysics of Animal Rights (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).
17. See Hartshorne's "Real Possibility," Journal of Philosophy 60 (Oct. 10, 1963), p. 599; also see pp. 596-597. Also see Rorty's "Comments on Professor Hartshorne's Paper," p. 606.
18. Hartshorne, "Real Possibility," p. 605.
19. Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process (Boston: Free Press, 1953).
20. See Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 69-70. Also see Rorty's "Relations, Internal and External," Encyclopedia of Philosophy (NY: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 125-133, which is cited by Hartshorne in Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 168; also see pp. 155, 166.
21. Rorty, "The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn," pp. 153-154.
22. Ibid., pp. 139, 141, 147, 153. Also see Rorty's "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 211, n. 5.
23. Rorty, "The Subjectivist Principle and the Linguistic Turn," pp. 152-155. Rorty relies on Hartshorne's "Process as Inclusive Category," Journal of Philosophy 52 (1955), pp. 94-102.
24. Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 523. This paragraph is consistent with the view of V.C. Chappell, "Comment," in Ernan McMullin, ed., The Concept of Matter, pp. 525-526.
25. See Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," pp. 29-30. Also see Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1948).
26. See my Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2003), ch. 10.
27. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," pp. 31-34.
28. Ibid., p. 35.
29. Ibid., p. 36.
30. See Rorty's Philosophy and Social Hope, p. xviii. Also see my "Hartshorne and Plato."
31. See Rorty, "Review of Understanding Whitehead, by Victor Lowe," pp. 246-251.
32. See Rorty, "Philosophy and the Future," in Herman Saatkamp, ed., Rorty & Pragmatism, p. 200.
33. See Rorty, "Response to Michael Williams," in Robert Brandon, ed., Rorty and His Critics, p. 219.
34. Rorty, "Comments on Professor Hartshorne's Paper," p. 606.
35. See Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 30. Also see Rorty's "Pragmatism, Categories, and Language," Philosophical Review 70 (1961), pp. 197-223.
36. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 32; also see pp. 31, 207, n. 5. Also see Hartshorne's "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," pp. 24-25. Rorty's rejection of Hartshorne's panpsychism is also found in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 113, 117.
37. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 34; also see p. 211, n. 6.
38. See my "Rorty on Pre-Linguistic Awareness in Pigs," Ethics & Animals 4 (1983), pp. 2-5.
39. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p. 156; also see p. 157.
40. Ibid., p. 157.
41. Ibid., p. 158; also see p. 166. Rorty cites Alasdair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism (NY: Columbia University Press, 1969).
42. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 159-163.
43. Ibid., pp. 158, 166.
44. See my Rawls and Religion: The Case for Political Liberalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001).
45. See Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 168-174. Also see my "Process Thought and the Liberalism-Communitarianism Debate: A Comparison with Rawls," Process Studies 26 (1997), pp. 15-32.
46. See Hartshorne's Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 5. Also see Hartshorne's comments in the audience discussion of his article "God as Composer-Director, Enjoyer, and, in a Sense, Player of the Cosmic Drama," Process Studies 30 (2002), p. 255.
47. See Hartshorne's The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934); and Born to Sing (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973).
48. See my "Hartshorne on Heidegger," Process Studies 25 (1996), pp. 19-33. Also see Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne, ch. 5.
49. Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," pp. 17-20.
50. Ibid.
51. See Hartshorne's "Are All Propositions About the Future Either True or False?," Proceedings of the APA: Western Division (1939), pp. 26-32. Also see the excellent work by George Shields and Donald Viney, "The Logic of Future Contingents," in George Shields, ed., Process and Analysis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), pp. 209-246.
52. Hartshorne, "Are All Propositions About the Future Either True or False?," pp. 26-32.
53. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," pp. 35-36.
54. Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," p. 25. Hartshorne's brother, Richard, was a famous geographer, it should be noted.
55. Ibid., p. 26.
56. Ibid.
57. See, e.g., Karl Popper, "On the Status of Science and Metaphysics," in Conjectures and Refutations (London: Routledge, 1963).
58. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 33.
59. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, corrected ed. (NY: Free Press, 1978), p. 5.
60. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 33.
61. See Rorty, "Philosophy & the Future," in Herman Saatkamp, ed., Rorty & Pragmatism, p. 197.
62. See my Plato's Philosophy of History (Wash., DC: University Press of America, 1981); as well as A Platonic Philosophy of Religion: A Process Approach (forthcoming).
63. Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," p. 17.
64. Douglas Pratt, Relational Deity: Hartshorne and Macquarrie on God (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002), p. 2.
65. Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," pp. 22, 24.
66. Paul Nancarrow, "Realism and Anti-Realism: A Whiteheadian Response to Richard Rorty Concerning Truth, Propositions, and Practice," Process Studies 24 (1995), pp. 59-75.
67. Ibid., p. 61. Also see Rorty's "Does Academic Freedom Have Philosophical Pre-suppositions?," Academe 80 (Nov., 1994), pp. 52-63.
68. Nancarrow, "Realism and Anti-Realism," p. 62.
69. Ibid., pp. 65-66.
70. Ibid., p. 67.
71. Ibid., pp. 66-67. Once again, see my Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne.
72. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (NY: Macmillan, 1961), pp. 244, 267.
73. Nancarrow, "Realism and Anti-Realism," pp. 68-69.
74. Ibid., p. 70.
75. Ibid., p. 73.
76. Rorty, "Matter and Event," p. 516.
77. Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," pp. 20, 22. Also see Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 116-117.
78. Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," p. 23.
79. Ibid., p. 25.
80. See a useful account that relies heavily on Whitehead by Shimon Malin, Nature Loves to Hide: Quantum Physics and Reality, a Western Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
81. Hartshorne, "Real Possibility," p. 600; also see p. 599.
82. Ibid., p. 600.
83. Ibid., p. 601.
84. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, pp. 114-115 on "Materialism Without Mind-Body Identity."
85. Hartshorne, "Real Possibility," p. 605.
86. See Descartes, Selected Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), "Discourse on the Method," Part One.
87. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, pp. 163-164. Also see Rorty's "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 211, n. 4.
88. See Hartshorne, "Rorty's Pragmatism and Farewell to the Age of Faith and Enlightenment," p. 24. Also see William Wordsworth, Poetical Works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," l. 49. Finally, see Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 31.
89. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," l. 92-96. Also see Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 211, n. 8.
90. See Rorty's "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 30.
91. Ibid., pp. 31-33. Also see Randall Morris, Process Philosophy and Political Ideology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991).
92. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, "Lines Written in Early Spring," l. 17-20.
93. Rorty, "Response to Charles Hartshorne," p. 32.
94. Ibid.
95. Ibid., p. 31. See William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, "Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," l. 182.
96. William Wordsworth, Poetical Works, "The Tables Turned," l. 28.