Charles Hartshorne
by Alan Gragg

Chapter 3: What Is Man?

As explained in chapter two, Hartshorne regards human conscious experience as our only reliable key to unlock the mysteries of reality. He is well aware that this procedure of taking human experience as the model of all reality may provoke from some quarters the charge against his metaphysics of unmitigated anthropomorphism. However, he denies the fairness and accuracy of this allegation, contending that his method is the only way philosophy can escape both radical skepticism about ultimate reality and an unwarranted tendency to assume that all of nature resembles human experience. He says that taking experience as the basic clue to reality enables the metaphysician to evade anthropomorphism because "experience is a category that is capable of unlimited expansion and variation. Consequently, to say that nature ultimately consists of experience does not at all imply that all these experiences are necessarily human. Rather, it is to suggest that human experience is merely one point on a practically infinite continuum of experiences and that other points on this fundamental cosmological continuum may be almost infinitely different from the human in intensity and quality of experience. To give one specific example, it is surely impossible for us to conceive of what an electron’s experience would be like, but we must conceive of it as some kind of experience or not conceive of it at all.¹ Therefore, it is probably less misleading to state that human experience is the one keyhole through which man may catch a fleeting glimpse of the vast panorama of the universe instead of the clue that solves the riddles of the cosmos. Hartshorne would be the first to acknowledge that countless enigmas and puzzles will remain even after the work of the most comprehensive and adequate metaphysical analysis has been done.

Nevertheless, it must also be said that, although Hartshorne has an understandable penchant for treating man as a somewhat special case, he in no wise thinks of man as an exception to his basic metaphysical vision that was depicted in the preceding chapter. Hartshomne’s view is that man is our best-understood case of exemplification of the basic metaphysical categories. In other words, his anthropology should be interpreted merely as a special instance within the broad context of his ontology, cosmology, and (as we shall see) theology. For this reason, this chapter on Hartshorne’s doctrine of man is located most appropriately between the previous one on his ontology and cosmology and the next one on his doctrine of God. For him, man should be comprehended within a cosmic context, but neither man nor the cosmos can be rationally understood apart from Cod.

Moreover, it does not seem unfair to say that the questions of nature and God have been Hartshorne’s most profound and direct philosophical concerns and that he illuminates the human scene chiefly by indirect light reflected from these other two primary focal points of his intellectual analysis.

Personal Identity

Perhaps the most startling feature to Western minds of Hartshorne’s (and Whitehead’s) philosophy is its conception of human personal identity. In this regard, Hartshorne remains fully consistent with the other principles of process philosophy and abandons entirely the "substance" theory of the human soul or self as held by Plato, Augustine, Kant and other classical Western metaphysicians. In the most concrete terms, according to Hartshorne, there is no permanently or continuously enduring human ego or soul or self. Therefore, he declares that human individuality and identity may not be properly defined in terms of a self-identical soul that persists unchanged from conception to death and perhaps beyond. To be sure, Hartshorne does not say that human identity through change is unreal or illusory, but he does assert that it is an abstraction and not a concrete entity. He means that, in regard to the question of absolute identity, an enduring human soul or ego may be abstractly real but may not be concretely real.

Then what is concretely real or actual about human personality? Precisely what is concrete reality about all things in the universe, namely, the "unit-experiences or "experient-occasions" that are the fundamental components of the cosmos? To quote Hartshorne: "My life consists of hundreds of thousands of selves, if by self is meant subjects with strict identity."² The "subjects with strict identity" are, of course, the actual occasions of the Hartshornian cosmology. In fact, if we agree with him that human experiences of as brief a duration as one-tenth of a second may be distinguished in consciousness, and if we disregard the problem of whether a sleeping person also experiences at about the same rate of ten occasions per second, then simple arithmetic enables us to conclude that the concrete reality of a human being that lives seventy years is well over two billion individual "selves"! In addition, this staggering sum is dwarfed by the countless trillions of events that constitute the electrons, atoms, molecules, cells, and organs that comprise that complex society of occasions that we call the body of a person who lives to age seventy. Speaking concretely, Hartshorne says that a man is a new self or person about every one-tenth of a second.

Undoubtedly, Hartshorne’s definition of a self as in actuality billions of selves is startlingly paradoxical -- at least at first glance. However, he contends that he has strong arguments in its favor, including the argument that it is much more paradoxical to try to explain how a self-identical human self could really change through the various stages of development that a normal human life undergoes. Another argument is that no human ego ever knows itself to be the very same ego throughout a lifetime. Where is this ego when the person is asleep? And in what sense does the living self in the concrete present identify itself as the selfsame ego of the newborn infant it once was or the senile octogenarian it might become? Is not the truth that each individual self knows itself as new each moment, remembering previous selves and anticipating future selves that are distinctive occurrences in their own specious moment of existence?³

Another argument is simply that analysis shows the impossibility of a self-identical self’s having a continuous series of new experiences without becoming a different self in the process. Each new experience, if added to the old self, would make that self a new totality that is different from the previous self by virtue of the newly added experience. Therefore, each moment of experience of the human self must make it a slightly different and novel self. The new self of each moment partly includes the old experiences through memory, although Hartshorne does not exclude as inappropriate some talk of an old self with new experiences, provided it is clearly understood that the old self is contained within the new experiences and not the converse.⁴ Furthermore, he reasons that, if human experiences were the properties of an identical ego instead of the ego’s being the property of the experiences, then to know an individual ego would mean to know all its future; and, therefore, we could not really know the individual in question until his death.⁵

As hinted in the previous paragraph, Hartshorne does not seek to proscribe all talk of personal identity, personality traits, and other enduring objects. His primary point is that the identity through change of such entities, though real enough on its own level, is something of an abstraction from its constituent concrete events. Moreover, he has recently conceded that a person, such as Charles Hartshorne, is "almost concrete," i.e, concrete by comparison with such more abstract entities as "triangle" or "being human."⁶ For example, "Charles Hartshorne" is a great abstraction in comparison with the billions of events or selves that have constituted that one human life; but it is also pointedly concrete by contrast with the notion of ‘‘human being."

Succinctly stated, Hartshorne’s position regarding the personal identity of man (or animals or what-have-you) is that a man is his experiences instead of has them. The experiences "have" the man or the personality. Thus a particular man is the common denominator of a connected series of experiences. "He" is the relatively abstract common feature of the sequence of states (or selves or experiences) that fit together in a succession that begins with conception and ends in death.⁷ Moreover, the primary bond that binds these states together into a distinctive series is that of sympathetic feeling, of which the two chief expressions are memory and anticipation. Sympathetic memory and anticipation, which are ingredient in every occasion of experience, are the forces that give a measure of identity through change to the present actual experience and past and future experiences in the same sequences.⁸

Hartshorne is not oblivious to the fact that his (and Whitehead’s) concept of human individuality poses some serious problems for our traditional concepts of personal responsibility and social justice, but he contends that the difficulties in question are not insurmountable. For example, he asserts that it is not a particular man or personality that performs a given deed but rather a momentary self or sequence of such selves. This means that one momentary self does a certain deed, and then another later momentary self in the same series may receive rewards or punishments for it. In fact, Hartshorne declares that the only reward a given momentary self can receive is the reward given in and with its own momentary activity, for thereafter it has ceased to exist in its unique particularity.⁹

The relevance of this theory to current notions of guilt and moral responsibility is patent. Should a court punish a different, later self for what another, earlier self has done? Also, should one self repent for the misdeeds of a previous self? Undismayed by such conundrums, Hartshorne suggests a possibly affirmative answer to both questions. Since any later self, though new in some respects, may also have a tendency to misbehavior similar to that of a previous self, both punishment and repentance may be in order for the purpose of achieving a relevant transformation of character. But once a pertinent change of character has been obtained, Hartshorne feels that further punishment of a particular man is ethically unjustified -- even though it may have some political justification as society’s best means of appeasing the anger of those who have been victimized by the "guilty party."¹⁰

Man as a Psychophysical Organism

Just as Hartshorne’s cosmology abandons the traditional Western metaphysical dualism of matter and mind, so his anthropology rejects the derivative notion, explicitly advocated by Plato and Descartes, that man is basically a dualistic being composed of a material body and a spiritual soul. Instead, he prefers to think of man as an organism that has a "psychical" pole and a "physical" pole that are mutually interactive and reciprocally dependent. Naturally, he does not object to the use of such terminology as "body" and "soul," provided it is remembered that the human body is essentially a vastly complex society of actual occasions and the human soul is the unifying, purposive agency of the body. Occasionally, Hartshorne even speaks of a "besouled body," but by such language he means only the probability of certain modes of action and experience that embody a given personality’s characteristic traits.¹¹ Consequently, he suggests that, when a person’s body goes into a deep, dreamless sleep, the soul loses its actuality, only to regain it when the person awakens.¹² Understandably, therefore, he disregards as inapplicable to his own view Gilbert Ryle’s well-known caricature of Cartesian anthropological dualism as "the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine" -- especially since Hartshorne denies that the human body is a "machine" in any materialistic, mechanical sense.¹³

In more typically Hartshornian language, a human being is a complex unity of two distinguishable-but-mutually-interrelated sequences of actual events: the sequence of processes in his bodily cells ("body") and the sequence of distinctively human or personal experiences ("mind" or "soul"). Moreover, Hartshorne holds that the interrelationship between the human body and mind is so intimate and reciprocal that the term "psychophysical organism seems to be the most accurate one for designating his total view of the person. As a result, it becomes apparent that Hartshorne’s doctrine of man bears some important resemblance to modern psychosomatic theories of personality and to the wholistic views of man dominant in twentieth-century biblical theology.

Hartshorne is unwilling for man to be regarded simply as the cellular processes of his body. This unwillingness is based primarily upon what he considers to be an undeniable and irreducible fact of human self-intuition: when one is directly aware of himself in a specific moment, he is aware of "himself" as a single unit of action and not of any system of cells. Therefore, Hartshorne reasons that man is more than his cellular processess and is as much a "single dynamic unit" as any of the electrons or cells that constitute his body.¹⁴

Furthermore, in the explication of his understanding of man, Hartshorne does not shrink from the somewhat novel and strange proposition that the human mind may possess properties that have traditionally been ascribed only to matter, namely, location and extension in space. He says that the human mind has a place or places in space in close proximity to the parts of the body and hence must also possess size, shape, and motion. The following sentence adequately expresses his position:

Moreover, if it be objected that the human mind derives its spatial character from its association with the body, Hartshorne’s rejoinder is that the converse proposition is equally true. That is, one could not know where his body is apart from his mind, for one locates his body always only in connection with the feeling or sensing of his mind.¹⁶

Concerning the manner of interaction between mind and body, Hartshorne maintains that there is only one possible intelligible explanation. It is that human mental experiences "immediately sympathize" with certain subhuman experiences of the cells in the body and that the converse relationship also holds to some extent. For example, the experience of suffering is, via sympathy, mutual between me and my cells. When they suffer, I suffer; and when I suffer, they suffer too.¹⁷ Hartshorne further contends that this view of interaction as sympathy has the merit of accounting both for the dependence of the mind upon the states of the cells in the brain and nervous system and for the power of the mind to control, within certain limits, the cells of the body.¹⁸ Given that the molecules and/or cells of the body have a certain amount of psychical life, continuous reciprocal interaction in the form of "organic sympathy" seems to be the only perfectly natural explanation for the obvious influence that body has upon mind and vice versa.¹⁹

In cases of human volition Hartshorne finds the clearest examples of the control of mind over body and, indeed, the only transparent instances of the direct control of one entity over another. In a typical instance of a person s volition regarding an overt bodily movement, Hartshorne says that the will or ego directly activates the nervous mechanism, which in turn directs the muscles, which eventually accomplish the desired movement. The important point is that the only relationship of power between the will and the nerves is one of organic sympathy. In his words, "The immediate object of effective human volition is a change in the human body."²⁰

Furthermore, according to Hartshorne, the relationships involved in human knowledge by means of perception are analogous to those obtaining in cases of volition. He states that a man may have immediate awarenesses of two kinds: intuitive awareness of his own thoughts and feelings and sympathetic awareness of certain changes in parts of his body.²¹ The second type of direct human awareness involves the principle that the objects immediately known in sensation or perception are always objects inside the body and never objects outside the body. In developing this principle, Hartshorne declares that no one can ever know any event outside his body with anything like the vividness and directness which may characterize his direct awareness of some bodily events.²²

Beginning with his doctrine of the "affective continuum"²³ in The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation, Hartshorne has taken pains to spell out some of the startling consequences of his view of sensation as outlined in the previous paragraph. In part, his idea is that sensation is always "representative" of objects outside the body but directly "presentative" of the actual states of cells within the body.²⁴ But now we come to the truly sensational aspect of his understanding of sensation! It is that "brain states flower into sensations" in such fashion that, when one senses certain qualities such as redness or sweetness or roundness associated with an object such as an apple, those perceived qualities are mainly the properties of his brain cells and not of the objects. Presumably, therefore, when one has the vivid perception of a hot stove associated with touching it, he is directly perceiving the "hotness" of his own bodily cells and only by indirection the hotness of the stove. Hartshorne intrepidly draws numerous conclusions of this sort, stoutly maintaining that his theory makes for more comprehensive sense than the traditional view that holds that, when one sees an external object, he really sees the object and not just a certain shape in his own brain. Accordingly, he upholds the "social-organic" view of sensation to the effect that the body can never do other than "echo" or "represent" its surroundings and directly "present" its own states to the immediately sympathetic human awareness.²⁵

If the human body and mind communicate directly through reciprocal sympathy, how do human beings communicate with each other? In the same way? "No, fortunately," replies Hartshorne. If human beings could communicate among themselves by direct sympathy, then they would be as mutually dependent upon each other as the body and mind are; and this condition would deny individual persons freedom and distinct individuality over against one another.²⁶ Although the relationship between one’s body and mind seems to be immediately social, Hartshorne holds that interchange between human minds is almost never by direct contact and generally through mediation of vibrating particles of air and other kinds of "matter." Therefore, individual human freedom, independence, and privacy are preserved, and still human beings appear to be able to communicate meaningfully and accurately with one another. According to Hartshorne, that human bodily cells lack such freedom and privacy with respect to the human mind should not be objectionable to them because of their radically inferior status; but a similar relationship of inferiority-superiority among human beings would be absolutely intolerable because it would rob some of their humanity.²⁷

Human Existence as Sociality and Love

As explained in chapter two and the preceding sections of this chapter, Hartshorne’s ultimate entities, the actual occasions of experience, are all social by nature. Their entire awareness is a sympathetic feeling of the feelings of other entities. On the human level, the experient-events of the body feel sympathy for other events in the same sequence, and the same holds true for the events in the same mental sequence. Moreover, the individual’s bodily cells have direct sympathy for his mind, and vice versa. Furthermore, Hartshorne asserts that human beings should have a measure of mediated and rationally based sympathy for all other human beings and, indeed, for all things in the universe.

Hartshorne beautifully defines "social" as the coordinate processes of weaving one’s own life from strands taken from the lives of others and giving one’s own life as a strand to be woven into their lives.²⁸ He also defines "self-interest" as the sympathy the present self may feel for future members of the same sequence, and "altruism" as "whatever sympathy that self may feel for members of other sequences, human, sub-human, or superhuman."²⁹ In addition, he suggests that every momentary self is really altruistic because of its innate interest in other selves and thus that "self-interest" is actually a special case within this universal altruism at the level of the ultimately concrete entities.³⁰

Furthermore, Hartshorne affirms his faith that human beings are often motivated by genuinely altruistic desires which are not merely forms of disguised self-interest. For instance, one may plan sympathetically for the welfare of others long after his death through such actions as making a will or buying life insurance, and he may enjoy these actions; but he does them not just for his own enjoyment but also for the future recipients of the blessings of his benevolence.¹¹ However, Hartshorne maintains that such universally common altruistic actions can only be fully comprehended rationally by appeal to God as superhuman mind who ultimately unites all persons and entities in his infinite awareness and memory. On this level, therefore, as well as on many others, as far as Hartshorne is concerned, the analysis of man "drives on (Tillich) to the question of God.³² Moreover, once one attains the vision of all things as united in the mind of God, he has reached the ultimate Hartshornian rational basis for feeling sympathetic respect for all creatures as contributing to the life of God. However, this reasoning does not lead Hartshorne to conclude that man must not kill any creatures at all or that all creatures are of equal value. Yet he does recommend killing other creatures only with reluctance, while at the same time acknowledging that a man is vastly more significant to nature (and thus to God) than an ant.³³

By means of his doctrines of sociality and altruism Hartshorne believes that he destroys any possible basis for a self-defeating atomistic and solipsistic human individualism. To paraphrase the Apostle Paul, Hartshorne believes that no man should or could live unto himself or die unto himself. Nevertheless, while avoiding the Scylla of individualism, he also strives mightily to steer clear of the Charybdis of all forms of collectivism. As we have been led to expect, he denies that even man’s intimate and ultimate relationship to God could ever rob man of his essential freedom and independence. Moreover, he also rejects any collective or "group mind," whether of family, nation, or race, above the human individual and below the mind of God in which human freedom and individuality could be submerged.³⁴ Hence, the way would appear to be open for free and responsible human social existence.

According to Hartshorne, each momentary human self is free by definition. If these selves are not partially capable of self-determination and thus partly free to wish, choose, and act in independence of the rest of the universe, then they are not distinct selves at all but are indistinguishable from a cosmic causal system.³⁵ Similarly, as explained above, Hartshorne holds that love in the form of sympathy, either immediate or mediate, is a fundamental feature of the human condition and of the total cosmos. Indeed, he insists upon the supremacy of love, suggesting that this insistence is a clear indication of the superiority of his panpsychism over metaphysical materialisms and dualisms. Without love, human life is not worth living. But have not those cosmologies that describe the universe as mostly blind, dead, loveless matter and those biologies that conceive all animal life as ruthless power struggles vehemently denied the possibility and relevance of love for human life? Still further, Hartshorne points out that our loveless physics and biology have produced in our time loveless politics and economics, with the results that we have seen the revival of human cruelty on an unprecedented scale and the adoption of callous economic policies which leave the alleviation of human miseries to the automatic functioning of the "market."³⁶ His view is that love and sympathy should be dominant conceptions in all human endeavors, whether they be metaphysical, physical, political, economic, or what-not.

Love, therefore, to Hartshorne, is a conceptually unifying and morally purifying concept. As "social" as the coordinate processes of weaving one’s own life from strands taken from the lives of others and giving one’s own life as a strand to be woven into their lives, and as the universal essence of actual events, the single principle of love is the master key to the understanding of both facts and values.³⁷ He denies that any human institutions, churches included, could be infallible; but he affirms that we can infallibly know "the appropriateness of love."³⁸ In his praise of love, Hartshorne extols it as the sharing of the sufferings of others that is our only consolation in the face of tragedy which is the inevitable concomitant of all experience. Moreover, he corrects Plato, who said that love is the search for supreme beauty, and declares that love simply is the supreme beauty.³⁹ In addition, he avers that the whole range of emotional and aesthetic experiences in whatever sensory form can be interpreted most illuminatingly as the manifestations and self-enjoyment of love.⁴⁰

The reader may be tempted by Hartshorne’s glorification of love and sympathy to think of him as a sheer sentimentalist. If so, he should read Hartshorne’s "Note" at the conclusion of Reality as Social Process, published in 1953.⁴¹ There he speaks of pacifism as error and afirms his conviction that the United States should not renounce the use either of strategic bombing or nuclear weapons in its "Cold War" with Russia. He suggests that the horrible nature of such military tactics may be more than counterbalanced by the horror of other means of warfare or of being an enslaved people. Moreover, he argues that, since tragedy is an ingredient in every situation, there are no easy solutions to our military and diplomatic quandaries. However, he does recommend more reliance upon imaginative diplomacy than upon weaponry; and he also decries the use of terror bombing of civilian populations, as was sometimes employed by the United States in World War II, in even the fiercest of wars.

The Nature of Immortality

That Hartshorne believes a thoroughgoing analysis of the nature of man always leads to consideration of the reality of God is most clearly seen in his discussion of the question of human immortality. He regards death as man’s inevitable destiny which we must all face; but how can we face it? For the nonbeliever in God, the only feasible notion of immortality seems to be a "social immortality" or an "immortality of influence" upon ones posterity, somewhat similar to that held by the ancient Israelites and by Aristotle. However, Hartshorne effectively catalogues the inadequacies of this view of immortality through posterity. For instance, if the human race eventually ceases to exist (and modern science forecasts this eventuality), then one will lose all his posterity and his "immortality." Furthermore, even if the race survives forever, posterity remembers very little about the lives of only a very few of its predecessors. Still further, and most tellingly, not even ones contemporaries can understand adequately the full range, depth, and quality of one’s life. Therefore, immortality in posterity appears to be a completely unsatisfactory answer to the question of human destiny -- unless, as Hartshorne advocates, God as the divine survivor of all deaths is included among one’s posterity.⁴²

Concerning the survival of the human personality after death, whether in the Platonic sense of the immortality of the soul or the biblical sense of the resurrection of the body, Hartshorne is at times agnostic and at others quite skeptical. Certainly, he considers the question of a post-mortem prolongation of personal experiences as a decidedly subsidiary and problematic issue.⁴³ The idea that the human self could, after death, go on having experiences in an unlimited forever seems to him to smack too much of making man into an angel or a God; therefore, Hartshorne avows that this is impossible.⁴⁴ Especially repugnant to Hartshorne’s sensibilities is the traditional belief that, after death, human beings spend an eternity in either bliss or torment, consciously enjoying rewards for good deeds done in this life or agonizingly enduring punishment for misdeeds. He admits that the traditional theory of heaven and hell might have conveyed certain spiritual truths, but he also insists that the whole idea is largely "a colossal error and one of the most dangerous that ever occurred to the human mind…."⁴⁵

Hartshorne seems to hold that we shall engage in no personal actions at all after death; and, as for rewards and punishments, he declares his rather unconventional conviction that they are all received in the now of the present moment of action and at no other time or place.⁴⁶

Furthermore, Hartshorne’s main point in this connection is that, even if death were postponed indefinitely or if people had an infinite series of experiences beyond death, the central question of whether or not our lives have any permanent value would still remain unanswered. Consistently with his entire philosophy of social process, he asserts that the main values of life are in the experiences of living, but these experiences vanish from our grasp and memory every second. Does this mean that all my previous experiences are now forgotten and lost forever? If so, then my life cannot have any enduring meaning or value. Therefore, to Hartshorne the question of immortality is paramountly a question of the immortality of personal experiences and not of persons.

What, then, is Hartshorne’s answer to the question of immortality? Have the vanished experiences of dead men and of living men perished forevermore? "By no means!" he exclaims. They are all everlastingly preserved in their total value, exactly as originally experienced, in the everlasting and omniscient memory of God. Once an experience has occurred, it can never really perish, for it is indelibly imprinted upon the all-retaining tablet of God’s memory throughout his literally everlasting future life. Man may forget, but God forgets nothing. Consequently, every feeling-event of our lives is a contribution to the memory and experience of God; and the chief questions for us to ask are whether our contributions to God’s everlasting treasury are worthy or unworthy. God, as "the cosmically social being," imperishably knows and loves every actual experience of feeling in all its unique nuances with unfailing zest and fidelity. This "objective immortality" of all experiences in God is for Hartshorne the only adequate solution to the problem. Apart from God, therefore, life would be without enduring value.⁴⁷ With God, human life from conception to death is an "innumerable caravan" of experiences that irresistibly move beyond the grasp of human awareness toward their perpetual preservation as everlastingly real in the divine remembrance. "The true immortality is everlasting fame before God."⁴⁸

In addition to settling positively and affirmatively the question of the enduring value of human life, Hartshorne’s conception of immortality can lay claim to other merits. First, it unravels the mystery of death. Death becomes not the sheer destruction or obliteration of life but merely its termination, the setting of a limit to the total number of indestructible experiences that comprise a given life.⁴⁹ Secondly, in urging upon man the principle that his actions help determine the nature of God’s everlasting memory of him, it gives very powerful inducement to highly moral and unselfish living within a cosmic perspective.⁵⁰ Finally, it affirms a cosmic basis for absolutely cherishing the worth of life’s every moment, inasmuch as "each moment of life is an end in itself, and not just a means to some future goal."⁵¹ In consequence, therefore, of all these principles, one cannot detect in Hartshorne’s doctrine of man even the faintest traces of despair of life’s ultimate meaning, fear or perplexity in the face of death, moral vertigo, or denigration of the enduring value of our transient earthly life.

In summation of this chapter, we can do no better than employ once again Hartshorne’s own words: