Over his long and productive life of 103 years, Charles Hartshorne wrote more than twenty masterful books and . . . published a new book in his hundredth year!
How can you possibly top that? One way would be to publish a new book posthumously, and Hartshorne (with a little help) has done just that with the publication of a new book called Creative Experiencing. If you want to follow, and sometimes be dazzled by, some of the most lucid and elegant reasoning in twentieth-century philosophy and theology, this is a book you will want to read.
How the book came to light is a good story in itself:
Hartshorne had stipulated that, after his death, his philosophical papers were to be archived at the Center for Process Studies in Claremont, California. Emily Schwarz, Hartshorne’s daughter, asked Donald Wayne Viney if he would help her prepare the papers for the move. Viney, a Hartshorne scholar, readily agreed. In the summer of 2001, while going through the papers, Viney discovered the complete manuscript of an unpublished book: Creative Experiencing. Such a find, he said, was “a scholar’s dream.”
The journey to publication took a decade, but a new book by Hartshorne was well worth the wait and, as Viney says, “a cause for celebration.”
As the book clearly reveals, Charles Hartshorne is a careful, rigorous, and creative thinker. When he begins to turn an idea, as a potter turns a wheel, he turns it not just once, or twice, but over and over again, looking at it from various angles. I almost said all angles, but as Hartshorne would surely remind me, that is the divine perspective.
To follow him through a process of reasoning is, then, to follow a process of exhaustive analysis. If we follow the process carefully, from beginning to end, things come to be seen in a new light, sometimes with the luminosity of a rational epiphany.
I can remember when I first gained a glimpse of what he meant by “the logic of ultimate contrasts,”—I felt goose bumps on my arms. I threw back my head and laughed out loud. I was laughing in sheer intellectual joy at the beauty of what Hartshorne had revealed. But I was also laughing at myself—because I had believed as true an idea that Hartshorne had just shown was far from the truth, indeed, an idea that had it exactly backwards, upside down, topsy-turvy. And Hartshorne had finally turned it right-side up so that I could see how the absolute is contained in the relative, and not vice versa, as received “wisdom” would have us believe for centuries.
Charles Hartshorne’s writings scintillate with so many new ideas and “metaphysical inventions” that I have called him the Thomas Edison of philosophy and I have written elsewhere of 34 Examples of metaphysical and philosophical truths discovered by Hartshorne, ancient truths that he revealed in a new light, and of intellectual errors he helped to overturn.
Hartshorne enjoyed robust intellectual vitality and productivity in his eighth and ninth decades. He shows, by something he wrote in the margin of the manuscript of Creative Experiencing, that he was still open to change and growth at age 89. What will surely be one of his lasting contributions to philosophy are his doctrinal matrices that present an exhaustive list of the formal options for thinking about God and the world—in terms of permutations of contrasting pairs such as necessity and contingency. Chapter nine presents a version of the matrices arranged in six columns. In the margin by this he wrote:
“Poor arrangement. Should be four rows and four columns. At 89 I still had not done it right.”
With some help from his mathematician friend Joseph Pickle he did get it right and the correct form appears in The Zero Fallacy, the book Hartshorne published in his hundredth year.
And then there is this:
From 1984 to 1991, when Hartshorne was in his late 80s and early 90s, four major books were published that were devoted to an analysis and critique of his work. In these four volumes, he wrote comprehensive responses to fifty-six scholars. If that isn’t intellectual true grit, what is?
In the final sentence of his Preface to Creative Experiencing, Hartshorne ends with a comment that helps to situate the book:
“With this book and its two predecessors, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method and Wisdom as Moderation, my contribution to technical philosophy may be essentially complete.”
Creative Experiencing: A Philosophy of Freedom
By Charles Hartshorne
Edited by Donald Wayne Viney and Jincheol O
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