1978 - theism in asian and western thought.pdf

7/27/2019 1978 - Theism in Asian and Western Thought.pdf

1/12

Theism in Asian and Western ThoughtAuthor(s): Charles Hartshorne

Source: Philosophy East and West, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 401-411Published by: University of Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1398644 .

Accessed: 24/10/2013 13:50

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of

content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms

of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of Hawai'i Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Philosophy

East and West.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 111.68.103.163 on Thu, 24 Oct 2013 13:50:01 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uhphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1398644?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/stable/1398644?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=uhp


2/12

CharlesHartshorne Theism in Asian and Westernthought

Of the great religions at least three are commonly regardedas theistic: Judaismand its two offshoots, Christianity and Islam. In some of its popular varietiesHinduism can fairly be called theistic. Surprisingly enough, Professor T. R. V.Murti, an Advaita Vedantist, once said, "India is the most theistic country ofall." But another Vedantist, Raja Rao, takes a rather unfavorable view of theidea of "God." For a strict follower of Safikara, Isvara or the Lord is at bestonly a supreme form of maya, not the true Reality.Buddhism is commonly taken to be nontheistic. Yet Suzuki once remarkedthat he was not sure about this. And if he was not, perhaps I cannot be. TheMahayana often seems close to Advaita Vedanta, that is, to Safikara's viewthat the highest reality is not like a person loving other persons, but is entirelybeyond pluralityand relationships, being nontemporal, nonspatial, untroubledpure bliss. In a certain technical aspect, the Thomistic theory has similarimplications, as when Thomas wrote that relations between the world and Godare relations for the world but not for God, also when he interpreted God'sknowledge of the world as identical with his awareness of himself as eternal,immutable, impassible, or when he defined God as simple, pure actuality,totally devoid of unrealized potentialities.In the West the appearance-realitycontrast, though it emerged quite early-in Parmenides-did not have the importance it had in Asia (especially India).Instead, a number of other dichotomies were used in the West to contrast theEminent or divine realitywith all else. These dichotomies include the following:contingent-necessary, effect-cause, passive-active, dependent-independent,relative-absolute, finite-infinite, mutable-immutable, extended-inextended. Thesecond or negative term in each contrast was the one applied to deity. In thefirst three contrasts the second term may not seem, but really is, negative. Thus"necessary" means "could not have been or be otherwise," "cause" is theindependent term in a cause-effect relation, and "active," as it has been usedtheologically connoted "impassible," incapable of being moved or influencedby another. God could influence or condition, he could not be influenced orconditioned in any way.

The logic of this famous "negative way" of characterizing deity was lessthan transparentlyconsistent, to put it gently. The categorical contrasts listedabove are not such that one can take one of the contrasting poles off by itselfand apply it to something. The causes we know are equally, in some relation-ships, effects; the dependent things are also independent (of some things); andwhere there is activity there is passivity. Only by passivity or by being partlyan effect can an activity relate itself to, or take account of, other activities. Toknow something is, as Aristotle saw, to be affected or influenced by it. We areeffectsof our ancestors and partcauses of our descendants,but it is the ancestorsof whom we have definite knowledge, not the descendants.CharlesHartshorne is Ashbel Smith Professor Emeritus, The Universityof Texas at Austin.PhilosophyEast and West28, no. 4, October 1978. (.( by The University Press of Hawaii. All rights reserved.

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


3/12

402 Hartshorne

If, as the negative theology held, God is to be distinguished by his indepen-dence, it must be because he is independent of every other reality, whereasa creatureis independent of some others only. Plato depended for his existenceand thinking not one whit on our existence. Similarly, whereas in a humanperson only some aspects are fixed or immutable (at least for a time-thusthe gene structureof the person's cells), and other aspects are mutable, in Godall aspects are held to be forever fixed.Such was the favored doctrine in classical Western theism. The reason givenwas that it is better to be immutable than mutable, cause rather than effect,independent rather than dependent. This implies a theory of value and, lookedat closely, a strange theory. It implies our inferiority in principle to our an-cestors, even our remote subhuman ancestors, and it also implies the superiorityto us of an insect that interests and thus influencesus, or the sun that warms us,without our doing anything appreciable to the insect or the sun! Worse, itimplies that the versatile human sensitivity, of which all our empirical knowl-edge is a development, makes us inferior to the atoms that are so much lessvariously passive. It is simply false that value is all on one side of the categorialcontrasts and disvalue all on the other side. To say that cause is good buteffect bad is to say that speaking is good but listening bad, or writing booksis good but reading them bad. It is also to say that it is good that God causesand influences us but bad if our existence and actions make any difference toGod. Yet the theologians who implied this also assured us that God knows,loves, and cherishes his creatures!Since the logic of classical theism is at best unclear, it is not surprising thatit led to no enduring consensus. Spinoza made the first great break with (onestrand of) this tradition. He returned to the Stoic view that not only is Godeternal and noncontingent in every respect, but also so is the world he createsand (in a strange sense) knows. There simply is no contingency, and what arecalled events or changes are items in a fixed whole that, to be seen truly, mustbe seen from the standpoint of eternity. All freedom or creativity in the genuinesense of determining what previously was indeterminate or merely possible isexcluded by this doctrine.I call this Stoic-Spinozistic view classical pantheism. Like classical theism ittried to treat God as exclusively necessary and immutable, though it did facethe logical requirement that divine knowledge must embrace and cannot besimply independent of what it knows. Yet Spinoza thought that the divinedependence upon the world (a dependence not made less real by his usinganother word for it) is acceptable because it is not dependence upon anythingcontingent or merely temporal. The dependence is so absolute that it can becalled something else, the relation of the Substance or God to its "modes" or"necessarymodifications." These are not changes produced in God by anythingin any way independent of God; they are, as it were, modifications of an un-modifiable reality. (Although Spinoza said that God was extended spatially,



4/12

403

he did not say that God endures.) Happenings in the world are to God as thesides of a triangle are to the triangle. Spinoza thus assimilates relations ofextreme abstractions and relations of the most concrete realities, actual events.Naturally the world was not convinced by this attempt to overcome the para-doxes of the theistic tradition, since it retained the basic paradox and addednew ones. The basic paradox is in the idea that the world and God are exclu-sively on opposite sides of categorial contrasts-as though one pole of acontrast could retain its meaning without the contrast, and hence the otherpole, also applying.After Spinoza, classical theism was more and more firmly rejected by phil-osophers, in favor either of agnosticism or of some form of theism whichconceives God as both eternal and temporal, both necessary and contingent,both active and passive, both cause and effect. The nonskeptical, "panentheis-tic," or "neoclassical" alternative to the medieval doctrine first appeared morethan three centuries ago in the Socinian theology. Post-Kantian idealisms werethe earliestphilosophical versions, apart from some hints by Hume's Cleanthes.Schelling and Hegel, however, were only temporarily and mildly impressive toreligious persons. At best their views were unclear or ambiguous. Reasonablyclear forms of neoclassical or "process" theology have begun to appear in thelast 120 years (Fechner, J. Lequier, W. P. Montague, Whitehead). UntilWhitehead they went largely unnoticed.In this new theism, instead of trying to exalt God by making him violate theessentially polar structureof categories, one attributesGod's unique excellenceto the eminent or unsurpassable way in which he is on both sides of ultimatecontrasts-except of course the contrast excellence-nonexcellence. (And in asense God is on both sides even of that contrast to the extent that the creaturesare really his, taken into his own life as cherished data of his awareness.) Thusthe divine reality is both necessary and contingent, for (a) its existence isnecessary, meaning that the divine essence (unsurpassability by another) couldnot fail to be actualized somehow,but (b) the particularhowof the actualizationremains contingent, could have been otherwise. Thus the divine essence isrealized in divine accidents, but the class of such accidents could not have beenand could neverbe empty. A particularcreature,by contrast, exists in accidentalstates the class of which could have been empty.

Although God, like the creatures, has both essence and accidents, yet thereis a differencein principle and not merely in degree between God and anythingelse. For not even the individual essence of the creature is unconditionallynecessary. The category of necessity does, however, apply to creatures, and intwo ways. Our ancestors were necessary to us, and that there be some creaturesor other (that God be actually and not merely potentially creative) can betaken as strictly necessary. Morris Cohen, the teacher of almost a generationof American philosophers, taught me something by his "principle of polarity"-though, being an unbeliever, he did not apply it to deity. The neoclassical



5/12

404 Hartshorne

or process view is that all concrete realities, including God, are dipolar, thoughonly God is dipolar in an unsurpassableway.It is time to ask, "What parallels to the foregoing kinds of theism can beidentified in Asia?" And at least an apparent parallel is to classical pantheism.I am thinking of a form of Mahayana Buddhism called the Hua-Yen tradition,as represented by Fa Tsang, in medieval China. The fact that Fa Tsang didnot have a term corresponding to the word "God" should not mislead us. ForSpinoza's use of this word is suspect, and I maintain that what Spinoza effec-tively has in his system is only the modes, whose rigid interconnectedness hecalls God, Nature, or Substance. "How," asked a contemporary of Spinoza,"are the modes in Substance?" "As drops of water (or was it waves?) are in thesea." This metaphorical reply, about as helpful as Thales' dictum, "All thingsare water," betrays a lack of any real doctrine of the divine uniqueness. Sub-stance, says Spinoza, necessitates its modes as a triangle necessitates its angles.Not only does he thus assimilate relations of extreme abstractions to those ofsupposedly concrete actualities, but also he makes Substance functionallysuperfluous. For if each mode is necessitated by Substance, the mode logicallyrequiresand so strictly necessitates Substance, and therewith all other modes.So why not say directly that each mode necessitates every other? Where all isnecessary, genuine distinctions disappear, because the entire content of thewhole is in every part.Now consider Fa Tsang. He says that all things interpenetrate, each thinginfluences every other. (I am here considering only the cosmology, not theBuddhistic doctrines about meditation and enlightenment, or the merelysecondary role for Buddhism of conceptual theories about reality.) Things areinterdependent, thus each thing implicates the cosmic system and is nothing-emptiness, sunyat--in itself. Each thing is, from one point of view, nonbeing,and from another it is all being. Thus each thing is every other thing. Logicallythis seems to me to duplicate Spinoza's cosmology. Nothing can groundalternative possibilities if anything you please requires every other thing to bewhat it is. And what validity can there be to distinctions between this and that?So we achieve serenity, for no matter what happens, it is all one. Is therenothing of this in Spinoza? About thirty years ago a book appeared calledSpinoza and the Dead God in which the author, named Melamed, interpretedSpinoza as a Buddhist. I thought the book hilarious, but also not without itspoint. Now that I know something about Fa Tsang I see still more point.

Another, and perhaps closer, parallel to Western forms of theism occurredin India. Madhva, a Hindu thinker influenced, I assume, by the earlier andmore nearly orthodox Ramanuja to depart from the austere nondualism ofSafkara, has a system that rather closely matches medieval classical theism.According to him there are five distinctions: between God as supreme souland lesser souls, God and a body, one nondivine soul and another, one bodyand another, one nondivine soul and a body. One can find these five distinctions



6/12

405

in European scholasticism. In both traditions the distinctions are real at bothends and are not relations of appearanceand reality. In both parts of the worldthere was a problem of understanding how these radically distinguished typesof entity could form a coherent whole.A difficult and for me crucial question is this, "What Asian parallels arethere for my dipolar or process theism, also called panentheism?" In India,Ramanuja did say (as Plato said) that the supreme Reality is both Soul andBody, the cosmos being the divine body. And Ramanuja so defines "body"that it need not mean, as it apparently did for Madhva, a reality different inprinciple from soul or mind. By a soul's body we should mean, Ramanujasays, that collection of entities over which the soul has most direct power orcontrol. Since the supreme Lord has such power over all things, the totalityof nondivine things is the divine body. So far so good. But this is still notdipolar theism. For the dipolar view, fully thought out, insists that the soul'spower or influence over the body, even in the divine case, is not the wholetruth; there is also a reverse influence of the bodily members upon the soul.There is thus interaction between nondivine things and the divine reality. AsI read Ramanuja, he denies this. He does say that the supreme Lord is im-mutable. Of course, tautologically, the essence of God is immutable, but thisis an abstraction, in my view, not the supreme actuality, which includes alsothe divine accidents, the class of which cannot be empty. The essence is merelywhat all possible divine accidents have in common, the "somehow" commonto all possible "hows" of divine actualization.In European dipolar theism, as early as in F. Socinus, the divine knowledgeof our free acts is conceived as contingent upon those acts, which might havebeen otherwise. Thus there are in God contingent effects the causes of whichare contingent happenings in the world. The same pattern is unmistakable inJules Lequier in the last century in France, and later in Whitehead. This iswhat is meant by the latter's assertion that God "physically prehends" theworld. Our free decisions influence God, and his responsive decisions influenceus. A clear statement of such a view in the best-known Indian philosophies ishard to find, though one can perhaps read it into the Upanisads or theBhagavad-Gitd.

A Hindu sect (Vaisnava Vedanta of the Bengal School) that seems to havea dipolar view of deity was founded by Sri Jiva Gosvamin. According to adisciple the view is that "God is full and has no room to grow, but it is a mysterythat he grows without cessation. In this process of never-ending augmentationall the values of joyful delight that are realized remain conserved with Him forall time." 1 (This recalls Fechner's dictum that God's perfection "is not inreachinga definiteor limited maximum but in seekingan unlimited progress ...The whole God is the maximum not only of the whole present but also of theentire past; he alone can surpass himself, and does it continually." 2) A monknamed Mahanam Brata Brahmachari belonging to this sect once came to the



7/12

406 Hartshorne

University of Chicago to earn a doctorate, and wrote a clearly acceptabledissertation (from which the preceding quotation about Sri Jiva Gosvamin istaken). In our first interview he told me that love was his basic principle. Tomy query, "What do you mean by love?" he replied, "It is the consciousnessof consciousness, and the feeling of feeling." Since Whitehead's category,"feeling of feeling," is my basic principle, I was delighted with this reply. Itimplies dipolarity, assuming that God loves his creatures. For, if he feels ourfeelings he cannot be uninfluenced by them and must be effect as well as cause.Robert Whittemore, who went to India to find out to what extent Hinduismis open to a panentheistic interpretation, came to the conclusion that Hinduscriptures are ambiguous as between a merely monistic and a panentheisticrendering.The monistic doctrine of Sankara is not an obligatory philosophicalreaction to those scriptures. The parallel to the relation between medievaltheism and the Bible suggests itself. Fewer scholars of the Biblical texts thanformerly are today ready to swear that the God of Genesis or Isaiah or theBook of Job or the Gospels is the God of Thomas Aquinas. Indeed, perhapsmost would deny this. In both East and West the love of tradition is strong butnot invincible. Saikara, like Thomas, achieved a kind of official status, yetRamanuja, like the more obscure Socinians, defended a somewhat contrastingview, and later many others, in East and West, moved toward a less one-sidedinterpretationof the Eminent Reality. Even Madhva said that nirgunaBrahman,the Supreme without Qualities, is not the true highest being, which is rathersaguna Brahman, the Supreme with Qualities. One need only see that thesequalities must involve contingency to have dipolarity.One religion so far not mentioned is Zoroastrianism, which posits two super-human beings, one good and one bad. The good spirit is ultimately superiorin power but not simply omnipotent. In popular Christianitysome such dualityis found, save that the evil power is divinely createdand as created was originallygood. In an extinct religion, Manichaeism, the evil power was the creator ofnature. (That this religion has died out is to the credit of our species.) In somebrandsof Hinduism, and in popular Buddhism, there are suggestions of super-natural beings who live to destroy and do harm. Supernaturalsources of evilas well as of good are often hypothecated. What should we learn from allthis?

The safest inference I take to be this: there is something wrong with theidea of omnipotence, if the word is used to mean that divine fiat can determinethe details of what happens, or that, although we think we decide our actions,in reality all actions are determined by the one supremeActor. The alternativeis simply to take seriously the idea of multiple creaturelydecisions. Before youor I decide anything something concerning our actions is really undetermined,even by God, and we, not God or demons, settle the otherwise unsettled. TheSocinians, Lequier, and Fechner took this view, and what Peirce and White-head have done is to generalize it for all creatures, creatures as such. Only



8/12

407

with this generalization does the view do the job assigned to it, that of makingit, in principle, intelligible, how there can be suffering as well as wickednessin a divinely created cosmos.In the idea of multiple decision-making there is an implication of chaos andconflict. Why should A's decision harmonize with B's, which B and not Adetermines, and which cannot be known to A until too late? By the time B'sdecision is made and known to A the joint occurrence of A's and B's decisionswill have already produced consequences that neither of them could havepreciselyintended. Add the divine deciderand the principlestill holds. Attemptsto conceive some divine magic that enables us to genuinely decide and yet Godto decide our decisions are, I feel quite sure, attempts to talk without sayinganything, or to evade an issue we ought, as candid thinkers aiming at clarity,to face once for all. Multiple freedom is the only answer to the question,"Whence sufferingand conflict?"

Suffering s, broadly speaking, an aesthetic evil. Moral wickedness (deliberateinflicting of harm, or choice of lesser among possible goods) is not explainedby the general principle of multiple decision-making. But this form of evil isconfined to animals with a high level of consciousness and awareness of moralprinciples. It seems implausible that animals with this higher kind of awarenesscould all infallibly act morally rightly rather than wrongly, any more thanthey could infallibly find the truth in interpreting evidence. Infallibility,cognitive or volitional, is a divine attribute. Even an infallible creator cannotproduce infallible creatures.It is not clear why a cosmic conspiracy, or a Satan, should be required toexplain the facts. Evil does not requirecosmic coordination, for it is essentiallyanarchic, egocentric, or ethnocentric. Good, however, does require a coordi-nating agency, not indeed to determine the details of good actions or results,but to set limits to the tendency toward chaos inherent in multiple freedom.The laws of nature are the way we try to think these limits. They are not, asLaplace thought, strictly determinative of details, but they do limit what canhappen. (Here Peirce, Boutroux, and Bergson were prophetic of the laterphysics.) Like political and moral laws, natural laws forbid rather than com-mand; they say what shall not happen. Within these negative limits creaturesdecide their own and each other's careers. The cosmic coordinating agent canbe thought of as aiming exclusively at good. In this way one does some justiceto the dualistic motifs of Zoroastrianism, taking them as warnings against theexcesses of the omnipotence doctrine, which was always a more or less overtdenial of creaturely freedom and, indeed, of the goodness of God. For thereally good respect the self-determining, the creative freedom, of others. Andfrom this the risk of conflict and mutual frustration cannot be eliminated.

How far this explanation of evil can be found clearly stated in Asia I do notknow. I do know that Western thought achieved clarity in this matter onlyrecently, and only in some circles. It was always a weak view that tried to



9/12

408 Hartshorne

explain evil by purely ad hoc assumptions about human action, while supposinga total absence of decision-making elsewhere in nature. A strong philosophicaltheory must take creativity or partial self-determinationas a universal category,eminent in God, noneminent but unusually great in our species, and presentin less and less degree as one goes down the scale of creatures toward atomsand particles. The statistical laws that are now the operative ones in physics,and indeed in all science, in principle harmonize with this idea, though I thinkit will be necessaryto admit some qualifications to the laws of quantum physicsin application to organisms, especially the higher types, and most of all homosapiens. Wigner and some other important physicists have suggested that suchqualifications are not to be ruled out. Contemporary microphysics has not yetachieved omniscience, even about the least elements of nature, much less aboutprotozoa and metazoa.With Herrlee Creel, I take Confucianism to be vaguely theistic, but with thefocus on ethics, not theology. Chinese thought tends to be this-worldly, andso in a sense does process theology. There is much in Neo-Confucianism withwhicha processphilosopher need not quarrel, putting aside the male chauvinismthat it shared with much Western and also Indian thought. The Confucianssensed the extremism, the one-sidedness, of the Hua-Yen doctrine, but theydid not, I incline to think, ignorant of their work as I am, correct it with anequally definite doctrine. Universal interpenetration is a definite assertion,erroneous in my opinion, but at least definite. The extreme opposite view,universal independence, is also definite, but if possible more obviously errone-ous. It is the "middle way," the genuine golden mean, that is hard to makedefinite. I have the impression that the Confucians gave some good hints inthe right direction here, but I doubt if they achieved the clarity that Westernthought is beginning to arriveat, especially in Whitehead's system, with whichChu Hsi's has been compared. What is lacking on the Chinese side, I imagine,is a comparable degree of definiteness, such as one finds in Leibniz in earlymodern times, and Peirce and Whitehead in recent times. (I have tried toremove some ambiguities and inconsistencies in their work.)

The combination of mathematics and careful measurement of natural phe-nomena has produced a sharper logic in the West than Asia has until recentlypossessed. This has not saved the West from great mistakes, but it has its value.In Whitehead we have at last what has hitherto been lacking, a philosophicalsystem by a characteristicWestern thinker, mathematician, logician, and phy-sicist, who yet is close to the Buddhist ideas of "no soul, no substance" and"mind only," but who avoids both the extreme pluralism of the Theravadaand the extrememonism of the Hua-yen doctrine of universal interdependence.(Whitehead sometimes verbally asserts this last, but in his technical conceptsof prehension, creativity, and time he qualifies it.)In one respect Whitehead's system is probably too pluralistic, if an apparentdiscovery of quantum physics known as Bell's Theorem is correct. There are



10/12

409

a priori philosophical reasons for suspecting that it is correct. I have neverbeen very happy about the relativistic view, accepted by Whitehead as well asEinstein, that there are mutually independentcontemporary events, contem-porary but not simultaneous. It is this idea that Bell requires us to revise.According to one physicist, Capra, science is now approaching, though it couldnever quite reach, a complete monism like that affirmed by Oriental mystics.But another physicist, who takes a "revised Whiteheadian" view, retains adefinite pluralism. It is neither a doctrine of mutual independence nor one ofinterdependence, but of one-way dependence only, so far as single events areconcerned. Only individuals, sequential groupings of events, can interact.However, this solution of the one and the many has yet to be evaluated byphysicists or philosophers.Western theism has exalted our species in comparison with the rest of nature.In Asia, especially China, there was never the hard and fast line betweenhuman and subhuman that was drawn in the West. This is one reason for theprevalence of vegetarianism in much of Asia, as compared to Europe. TheWest is more appreciative of this aspect of the Orient now than it used to be.In general the Chinese sense of the naturalness of man, and of the generalwisdom of nature, is congenial to a process philosopher, as is the focus uponbecoming rather than mere being.One final comparison. The Hindus speak of creation as the dance of Siva,or as divine play. There are two ways of interpretingthis, one of which seemsmuch more acceptable than the other. The unacceptable interpretation makesplayful creation a form of omnipotence, deity simply, though capriciously,determining worldly happenings. This is the tyrant idea of deity. The otherinterpretation takes divine decisions as determining only approximate orstatistical outlines, leaving details to the nondivine agents. But the point ofcalling the operation play is to reject by implication anything like the absurdlyrationalistic view best expressed by Leibniz when he declared that God increating looks over all possible worlds and gives the nod to the best possibleone. In this superbly unreasonable piece of rationalism, Leibniz combined theomnipotence fallacy with an equally unacceptable theory of possible worlds asno less completely definite than the actual world, lacking only some mysterioussomething called existence or actuality. What possible worlds lack is preciselydefiniteness. As Whitehead says, "definiteness is the soul of actuality." Possi-bility, as Peirce insisted, is incurably lacking in definiteness or particularity.There are no possible particulars. And there is no basis for the notion that aworld could be such that no better world was possible. Rather, there is anopen infinity,with no definite maximum or optimum, as creativity keeps addingnew actualities, and the "objective immortality of the past" (Whitehead-alsoBergson by implication) preserves the additions.The term "play" vividly suggests that there can be no unique reason for aparticularact. Life's problems are not like equations each with but one solution.



11/12

410 Hartshorne

The intention, "Let us talk pleasantly and kindly together," gives two peoplea reason for not insulting each other, unless in friendly jest, but it could notnarrow down the possibilities to a definite set of sentences to be uttered anda precise tone of voice and distribution of emphases in the uttering of them.Reasonable motives always, and this by logical necessity, leave open optionsas to their implementation. This was why Kant's definite duties were allnegative, and his positive duties (for example, promote the happiness of others)are all indefinite or, in his quaint rationalistic language, "imperfect." Livingcannot be reduced to deductive inference, and this is true for God as well asfor thinking animals. "This is the best possible thing, therefore I do it" canapply only to a class of possible acts, not to a single definite one. Finally, sheernonlogical decision must come in. Even mathematicians make such decisionswhen they decide what statements to treat as postulates and what as deducibletheorems. This is in the logic of what they are doing and cannot be overcome.Creation must in this sense be play. The idea of divine play was therefore aprofound theological insight, which was denied not only to Leibniz, but toSpinoza, Aristotle, and many other Western rationalists, and was at best onlyvaguely hinted at by Plato. But it is, in other words, explicitly affirmed byWhitehead.

In its classical forms theism was not a definitive success. It was too pluralisticand dualistic in Augustine, Thomas, or India's Madhva, and too monistic inSpinoza, Hegel, or Royce. But is Buddhist nontheism a definitive success? Is"escape from birth and death" or from suffering a sufficiently positive ideal?I am thinking of the almost theistic sounding Buddhist text, "There is aneternal being, unborn and undying; were it not so we could not ourselvesescape from birth and death." And will it do to regard the totality of life ashaving its sole value in the way it makes possible, through many reincarnations,to replace life entirely by something called nirvana? If all things are imper-manent, why does this not render all achievement, including that of becomingenlightened, completely vain? Is the solution of the problem of the ephemeralstatus of all things to be found in some symmetricaldoctrine of interdependence,or is there a better way of dealing with time's arrow and the contrast betweenthe settled past and the open, indeterminate future? "Dependent origination"and the goal of bringing all things to buddhahood suggest asymmetry, but therelation of this to nirvana is sheer mystery, so far as I can see.I believe that at its intuitive core (often partly betrayed by theologies) theismhas an ultimate truth, a truth that properly relates unity and diversity, noveltyand permanence, and causation (including whatever truth there is in karman)and creative freedom. It can agree with Buddhism that what is usually meantby "personal immortality" is beside the point; but it has no need for reincarna-tion. It does not assert universal interdependence, for two reasons: we dependonly on our ancestors, not our descendants,and we depend for ourveryexistenceon God, who could have existed without us. For the process interpretation of



12/12

411

theism, life consists of really distinct and additional creative acts or self-determining experiences that have as their data previous instances of the sameprinciple of creativity and that offer themselves as data for all future instances,whatever instances there may be, and above all for the Eminent Creativity.Whereas the Buddhist tries to will directly the good of all, the theist willsabove all the good of the Eminent One by whom all are cherished. So thetheist, too, wills the good of all, but in such fashion that the whole of reality,an ever-growing unity, is taken as both inclusive object and inclusive subjectof love. Like the Greeks, the Buddhists and many Hindus think that there issomething simply beyond love. The theist does not; he holds that social related-ness applies not only among the members of the cosmic society but also betweenany member and the cosmic whole or inclusive reality. The entirety becomesEminently personal. And the perishing of all creatures is also their becomingdata for the love that cannot forget or cease. The precious moments of life"perish and yet live forevermore."Whitehead retains what Berdyaev claims is unique to Christianity, its fullacceptance of the elements of tragedyinherent in life as such, for these tragediesqualify the Eminent life itself, the "fellow suffererwho understands." White-head and Berdyaev independently explain sufferingthrough creaturelyfreedom(plus, in the human case, egocentricity and greed) and attribute suffering alsoto God.

In the three preceding paragraphs language is stretched to its limits. Thisbrings me to Professor Liu's remarks about the need to transcend the merelyliteral uses of words. I appreciate the wisdom in these remarks. But I thinkalso that language can mislead us even when it is used to state the limitationsof language. What cannot be said by one language in one state of culture maydiffersomewhat from what cannot be said by another language in another stateof culture. Intellectual progress is partly linguistic, and the great discoveriesof the West, increasingly contributed to and shared by the East, in varioussciences, using that word broadly to include logic, mathematics, and linguistics,have not left the limitations of language exactly where they were in ancientChina or India, or for that matter in ancient Greece or medieval France orBritain. Wisdom is both more and less than literally expressible knowledge;and the line between the two is not completely fixed, once and forever.

NOTES1. C. Hartshorne and W. L. Reese, PhilosophersSpeak of God (The University of Chicago,1953), p. v. Various parts of this annotated book of readings are relevant to the present essay.2. Hartshorneand Reese, PhilosophersSpeak of God, p. 252.

1978 - theism in asian and western thought.pdf

Documents