The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination

The eminent theologian Paul Tillich is reported to have once said at an academic symposium, “We ought to have had [Charles] Hartshorne, he knows more about these things than the rest of us put together” (letter from Charles Hartshorne to Schubert Ogden, November 26, 1963, Schubert M. Ogden Collection, Drew University Library). Indeed, for the second half of the twentieth century, one would have been hard pressed to find anyone as thoroughly knowledgeable in, and moreover who made so many substantive contributions to, the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology as Charles Hartshorne.Perhaps Donald Wayne Viney and George W. Shields would agree with that assessment; at the very least, they would be well positioned to do so. Indeed, as arguably the capstone of careers that at least since their doctoral days have been devoted in significant measure to understanding, critiquing, and advancing Hartshorne's philosophical achievement, The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination should serve as an enduring testament to both of its authors’ lifetime labor of love. Although tragically Shields died shortly after the book's completion, his and Viney's legacies as interpreters and champions of Hartshorne's philosophy have now been assured with its publication.Thoroughly researched, this work draws from a wide range of the twenty-eight books Hartshorne authored, coauthored, or edited and the more than five hundred articles and reviews he wrote as well as from a large swath of his writings’ critical reception. (Indeed, not least among the work's contributions is the inclusion of an updated and exhaustive primary bibliography of its subject's corpus.) The result is a generally outstanding summary of Hartshorne's thought, divided into the following topics: (1) his life and academic career, with focus on his intellectual development; (2) his theory of sensation and the affective continuum as largely explicated in his rather important but often neglected The Philosophy and Psychology of Sensation (1934), which “continues to be within the vanguard of contemporary scientific research on sensory affectivity and evolutionary psychology” (385); (3) the nature and method of metaphysics, covering themes such as dipolarity, inclusive asymmetry, and position matrices; (4) neoclassical metaphysics, with concentration upon motifs such as creativity, psychicalism, and time and modality; (5) neoclassical or dipolar theism, including attention to the nature and existence of God, the meaning of divine perfection, panentheism and the divine relativity, and dual transcendence; (6) theistic and antitheistic arguments, with emphasis upon the character and significance of the ontological argument as well as an interpretation of Hartshorne's various theistic arguments as severally comprising a cumulative case constituting a Global Argument for dipolar theism; (7) a Hartshornean critique of the so-called new atheists’ attacks on theism and religion; (8) the question of compatibility between dipolar theism and certain interpretations of relativity theory as well as various cosmological models concerning the commencement and consummation of this cosmic epoch, in addition to speculative theories about multi- or parallel worlds; (9) Hartshorne's moral philosophy in general, undergirded by his theory of contributionism and the great love commandment and informed by meliorism and the via media, and its application to such ethical issues as the permissibility of abortion, the rights of nonhuman animals, the effects of modern technology, and the ordering of the political economy; and (10) a reflection on Hartshorne's philosophical legacy.Given such a wide-ranging variety of topics, the authors’ demonstrated command not only of Hartshorne's thought in relation to all of them but also of that of his interlocutors in respect to any one of them is especially impressive. Indeed, such command allows Viney and Shields effectively to place Hartshorne in illuminating conversation with important thinkers whose work he himself did not engage (e.g., Christopher Hitchens, Jacques Ellul) and with relatively novel fields of inquiry he himself could not investigate (e.g., AI technology, the new atheism). Also commendable is the fact that, despite its coauthorship, the text throughout is relatively seamless and makes for enjoyable reading. Such enjoyment is enhanced by the helpful inclusion of various supplementary tables and figures as well as by the authors’ judicious employment of symbolic logic (with a prefatory key to the logical symbols so employed) to clarify and elucidate aspects of Hartshorne's arguments.To be sure, a work of this breadth and magnitude is susceptible to a variety of criticisms. Outstanding among my own is the authors’ failure to include in their account representatives of an “austerely” transcendental metaphysics who have critically and constructively sought to appropriate Hartshorne's achievement and, by so doing, have arguably advanced (beyond) it. I have in mind especially Hartshorne's student Schubert Ogden (see Ogden's Notebooks) and Ogden's own student, Franklin I. Gamwell (see Gamwell's Existence and the Good: Metaphysical Necessity in Morals and Politics). Ogden, for instance, has produced what I take to be the most trenchant and penetrating critique of Hartshorne's categorial metaphysics in general and his psychicalism in particular via a thorough dismantling of his theory of analogy as a putative third stratum of religious language; nevertheless, Viney and Shields—although surely aware of that critique—do not even mention it among the several (weaker) critiques of psychicalism that they do present and, in turn, subject to criticism. Likewise, our authors fail to engage the metaphysical-moral achievement of Gamwell—despite acknowledging him as “perhaps the thinker who has most systematically and profoundly developed the implications of Hartshorne's neoclassical metaphysics for the fields of moral philosophy and political theory” (482n51). Some critical engagement with Gamwell's sustained arguments would have added even greater rigor, depth, and insight not only to the penultimate chapters on Hartshorne's applied philosophy but also to the section on “Divine Temporality and Special Relativity,” insofar as Gamwell's revisionary neoclassical proposal concerning the divine-world relation provides a distinct and arguably more nearly adequate alternative to the options for reconciling the two that Viney and Shields entertain.Such criticisms aside, our authors’ “hope to have produced an updated, wide-ranging, and sustained critical overview of Hartshorne's thinking” has largely been realized (viii–ix; emphasis deleted). Indeed, Viney and Shields are to be commended for having bequeathed to scholars what should rightly be regarded as the most comprehensive critical study to date of Hartshorne's intellectual development and achievement.