In 1991 Charles Hartshorne wrote an “Open Letter” to Carl Sagan that was published in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Hartshorne’s letter follows in this Post, followed by Sagan’s Reply and Hartshorne’s Reply to Sagan. This is followed in turn by an “Open Letter” to Hartshorne by Yale University professor John. E. Smith and Hartshorne’s Reply to Smith.
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Dear Professor Sagan,
Somewhat like you, I am an academic professional, and also, even primarily, a writer and public lecturer—only not so brilliantly successful as you in reaching the educated public. I fully share the enthusiasm aroused by your work in informing people about science. In my long adult lifetime of knowing scientists who do this kind of thing I find you the most versatile, helpful, and pleasing—a national treasure.
I write to you for a particular reason. In Broca’s Brain you say you wonder about what biases you may have that limit your insight. I think my different background and perspective on some topics may be helpful here. As you (like all the best scientists) also do some philosophizing, I (and the philosophers I most favor) have more than casually participated in several branches of empirical science, in my case especially the psychology of sensation and the ethology of singing birds (and singing animals generally). If you are strongest in physics, I am strongest in psychology and biology. But most of my philosophical favorites were, in their time, also physicists—recently Whitehead and Peirce, farther back Leibniz, Descartes, Epicurus, Plato. (Aristotle, great in biology, logic, and ethics, failed miserably in physics, as even I can see.)
1. You have a clear, strong bias in favor of reductive materialism. I am with you in opposing a dualism of mind and mere, mindless matter. But I avoid dualism by rejecting matter in this extremely negative sense. Many physicists have done this (Leibniz, Peirce, Whitehead) and also biologists (Sewall Wright, et al.). I defy anyone to furnish a non-question-begging criterion for the total absence of mind anywhere. Popper tried, but admitted he may have failed. Descartes definitely said he had failed. He ceased to be a Cartesian dualist, but not by becoming a materialist. Historians have not told us this significant fact. Richard Zaner, the phenomenologist, discovered it.
2. You have a bias in favor of mechanism. Sewall Wright once said, “There is nothing but freedom,” and he also agreed with me that there is nothing but mind (in mostly non-human and sub-human, but also, perhaps, super-human forms). Freedom and mind go together and are two aspects of one thing. By freedom I mean what common sense takes the term to mean: that what is done (thinking and feeling being forms of doing) might have been done differently, that it might have been done other than it was, even given the entire past, including any previously established “character” of the agent. This does not connote “uncaused” events. Causes are necessary preconditions. Without these the deed or event could not have been done or have happened; with them it could. The future is not only what “will be” but also what “may-or-may-not-be.” To deny this is to assert absolute determinism. The ancient Greek who was clearest about all this was Epicurus, the so-called materialist, who anticipated Peirce, Bergson, Whitehead, and Dewey about time as “objective modality” [Peirce]. Epicurus’s famous “swerve” of atoms allowed them bits of freedom. He was a polytheist, not an atheist. Even his atoms were eternal.
That there is mind and freedom everywhere does not mean (panpsychism) that “everything” feels or thinks (or acts) freely. Rocks neither feel nor act freely and trees probably do not, but, according to my psychicalism, their molecules or living cells do. A tree is a society partly of living and partly of dead cells. The former multiply and the tree “grows.” Similarly with a termite colony. Rocks, trees, and termite colonies are not active singulars; molecules and cells are.
3. You have an epistemological bias; you opt for complete empiricism, so that even the existence of God is an empirical (not a metaphysical) question. Here history shows a long tradition against you. Popper is a recent example. And on this question you are scarcely an authority. I have been called “the greatest living metaphysician.” In their time, Peirce and Whitehead could, with perhaps more truth, have been called that, and without them I might have been rather unimportant.
Note that psychicalistic non-dualism is compatible with a mind-body duality, and mind-body interaction, the body being itself physical on cellular (and lower) levels. Each living cell has its own feelings and our sensations (of pleasure, pain, sweet, sour, etc.) are our direct feelings of their feelings. This relation, feeling of others’ feelings, Whitehead calls “prehension.” Without the words, I had this idea before Whitehead, but without definite reference to cells or molecules (and in other respects deficient in scope and definiteness).
Popper gives the best definition of metaphysical truth: that which no conceivable observation could falsify. For example, “something exists.” Or, “there are experiences.” Popper’s example (his “realism”) is close to these, except that Popper is a (non-dogmatic) dualist. He is not a mechanist.
All the great world religions, with the ambiguous exception of Buddhism, conceive the divine as “unborn and undying” (a Buddhist formula). It follows, according to Peirce’s “objective modality” of time and Aristotle’s modal logic, that God can neither exist nor fail to exist contingently. “With eternal things, to be possible and to be are the same” (Aristotle). As I put it, “Accidents do not happen in eternity.” I have no doubt about the validity of this principle.
4. Your being a physicist explains your stressing observations by physicists as empirical tests of theism. Fred Hoyle seems to do this also. A more usual empirical objection to theism is the “problem of evil,” the amount or intensity of suffering, frustration, and wickedness in the world. The pervasiveness of freedom, a negative aspect of which is chance, explains the frustrations. As for wickedness, no one has cogently explained how freedom on the human speech level could be present in an infallibly innocent, ethically good form. This, like being unborn and undying, is a divine or cosmic, not a human or localized, individual attribute.
As for physical pains, like physical pleasures, they seem required for anything like localized sentient life. How could animals adapt without the negative reenforcement of the one and the positive reenforcement of the other. As for single-celled animals or plants, I hold with the specialist who said that, if the behavior of these creatures were as familiar to us as the behavior of cows, we would attribute feelings to them also.
Fechner thought trees were conscious. A botanist objected that a tree is too weakly integrated to be, as a whole, aware of its bodily parts, as macroscopical animals are. A textbook in psychology, published perhaps ten years ago, remarked that, since vegetables respond to stimuli there should be a psychology of them. Nothing was said, however, about the distinction between multicellular plants as wholes and their cellular or subcellular parts. What no ancient knew, we know—that plants and animals both have cells, but only animals have their actions integrated by nervous systems.
“God,” denoting the uniquely cosmic individual, also stands for an individual whose existence is modally unique. It alone cannot be, or fail to be, contingently. God is either necessary or impossible. The choice must be conceptual, not observational. Yet you are right in saying that Anselm did not prove his idea of God, for he assumed that his definition of God was coherent—neither contradictory nor a mere absurdity. Many have argued persuasively that classical theism of the medieval type fails to meet this requirement, and therefore could not be true. I am one of these. But there are several essentially different formulations of theism that cannot, at least for the same reasons, be incoherent. Although God is conceptually the only non-contingent individual, World (if we mean here only some world or other, some togetherness of non-divine individuals) also can be necessary (though not a definite individual) as well as God. In other words, God-with-some-world is that which is either necessarily true, or necessarily not true (without coherent meaning). The Socinians defined God’s eternity to mean “God cannot (could not) not exist.” Change in some of God’s qualities is not excluded. Only what makes God God need be unchanging. Extreme doctrines of genetic or personal identity (Leibniz) make trouble here, but they exclude freedom and genuine contingency. I dismiss them as absurdities.
If only temporal things can be contingent, then the laws of nature are either valid for no reason during beginningless and endless time, or are pure conceptual necessities. If the former, then empirical cosmology could extrapolate infinitely in either temporal direction. However, only God could know much of what is beyond our “cosmic epoch,” perhaps what is before the Big Bang.
5. I with to heartily endorse your separation of two questions: God’s existence and posthumous careers for us. If this is a bias then it is one I and quite a few theologians share. Indeed, I think theism, as best formulated, agrees with Peirce, Whitehead, ancient Judaism, and Aristotle (against Plato), that infinity in either temporal direction makes us incongruous rivals to deity. Dante’s and Milton’s religions were far better poetry than theology. Berdyaev called the idea of living in hope of posthumous rewards and in fear of posthumous punishments “the most disgusting morality ever conceived.” I find it also close to zero in credibility. Whitehead’s “objective immortality” of the deity’s cherishing its past creatures has, ever since I read about it, settled that issue for me. God’s immortality makes ours an impertinence. It is pre-scientific and anti-scientific. Yet the ancient Jews mostly avoided it (as in the Book of Job).
Much theology has been absurdly anthropocentric, but not because it was theology. God is the cosmic individual whose body is formed by all the individuals that are not divine. I here speak with Plato (according to Shorey, Burnet, Cornford). God, Plato says, cares about or values the creatures. The idea that non-human animals are there only for their usefulness to our species never was good theology. “Creation science” is one of the prescientific fancies Darwin should help to save us all from. A medieval mystic wrote: “All the forms of being are dear” to the divine [all-conceivable-others-surpassing] being.
Yes, the argument of Anselm’s by itself does not prove theism, for it assumes that we have a coherent idea of God with positive self-consistent meaning. This is not self-evident. Perhaps “God” stands for a mere cosmic question mark. Some of your citations suggest this. However, that Anselm’s argument does not prove theism does not entail that it proves nothing.
Suppose the argument fails only because it is impossible to give coherent meaning to the idea of God, as the being exalted beyond all possible others and hence worthy of worship (of being “loved with all one’s being”). Then theism cannot be true, and no such being could exist. God’s existence is then impossible. The choice is between: coherence, therefore existence; incoherence, therefore non-existence. Can physics, as an empirical discipline, decide the issue?
The conclusion I draw is that any decisive theistic argument, pro or con, transcends empirical science as such. J. S. Mill and William James tried to formulate the idea of a wholly contingent deity. So far as I can see, they got no results useful for religion. How much better, stronger than us is God? Could God cease to exist? Has God always existed? How would we know? Is the view polytheistic? Everything seems uncertain, and incurably so. After all, values are not topics in the equations of physics, chemistry, or astronomy. It is not from physics that the last cognitive word can come.
I agree that the design argument, taken as empirical, also fails. It should be formulated otherwise than as an argument from the special qualities of our actual world, our cosmic epoch. Rather, we should argue from orderliness as such, and orderliness that nowhere completely determines details, everywhere permits some contingency, some freedom. Any world must imply God, or none can do so.
I have formulated six arguments, each a revision of one of the classical arguments, to meet the basic modal, epistemic, mind-body, freedom requirements specified (and some additional ones). These arguments together for me exclude any cosmology incompatible with “neoclassical” theism, one of the sixteen views concerning theism that by combinatorial mathematics exhaust the possibilities. It is symbolized by four letters AR. ar. Capitals refer to God, lower case letters to World or what is distinguishable from God. The other combinations (fifteen of them) are derived by omission of one or more of the four letters, including the zero case, OO.oo. ‘A’ or ‘a’ stands for absolute, ‘R’ for relative. Other similarly general contraries, including Necessary-Contingent, Infinite-Finite, Possible-Actual, yield comparable sixteenfold tables. Classical Theism is N.c., Classical Pantheism is N.n., and Aristotelian theism N.nc. Most historical theisms and non-theisms find places in the table. My view is NC.nc., its opposite, OO.oo. This is the pair of combinations that involve maximal opposition. If one is most true, the other must be most false. For me this is already an argument for NC.nc. I could not worship or love or even admit a mere nothing.
Others may find another of the sixteen options at least as credible. The final decision is personal, but at least, and at last, we know what the question is, and among what conceptual combinations we are making a choice. Six combinations have been viewed as theistic, nine can be if a wholly contingent, relative, or finite deity is allowed. Four options are obviously atheistic, the remaining three are forms of acosmism—only supreme, divine reality is admitted, as though the creatures only think they exist, or indeed only think they think. If this table of options is not a rational approach to the God question, then I am indeed mistaken.
I dare not hope that this letter will give you anything remotely approaching what your work has given so many of us. Perhaps my writing to you for the reason I gave was, as they say, a “low percentage shot.” I apologize if it seems inappropriate.
More power to you!
Charles Hartshorne
University of Texas at Austin
Source:
The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
New Series, Vol. 5, No. 4 (1991), pp. 227-232
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Carl Sagan’s Reply to Charles Hartshorne:
Cornell University
Center for Radiophysics and Space Research
Space Sciences Building
Ithaca, New York 14853-6801
Laboratory for Planetary Studies
February 27, 1992
Dr. Charles Hartshorne
724 Sparks Avenue
Austin, Texas 78705
Dear Dr. Hartshorne:
It was a great pleasure to receive your kind letter and the most interesting and generous enclosure. I want you to know I’ve been a reader of your work for some decades and once attempted to work through in some detail your classification of the world’s religions. Let me briefly say that I plead guilty to being a rationalist and an empiricist. I’m a materialist in the sense that I’m reasonably sure that a material world exists. I don’t believe in spirits—not because I’m positive they cannot exist—but only because I know of no compelling evidence for them, and also because I have some appreciation of how badly some of us want to believe in such a realm. If as you say, “everything seems uncertain, and incurably so,” and if we also are aware of the proclivity of us humans to comforting self-deception, then I would argue that, incomplete as it may be, empiricism, experiment—in short the scientific method—is by far the best we can do.
I believe my mind is reasonably open. To give you a sense of what I consider a compelling argument for the existence of God, I send you the enclosed novel with my warm regards.
Cordially,
Carl Sagan
CS/ey
Enclosure
P.S. I was an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of Chicago between 1951 and 1960 and first heard of you there. (I also knew and admired Sewell Wright, although I was unsympathetic to his religious ideas.)
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Hartshorne’s Reply to Carl Sagan:
Dear Professor Sagan,
I deeply appreciate receiving your wise and important book which I’ve read through. Without mastering the mathematics involved (for which I trust you) I see the main points, and the reasons you give for them. I have myself never doubted the reality of numerous planets with life on them, in some cases high forms of life. Indeed, like a number of philosophers and theologians of recent decades, my belief is that with a properly generalized idea of life wholly non-living or mindless stuff or process becomes a myth not a possible reality. Also, like Edward O. Wilson, I am fascinated by the non-human forms of life on planet earth. I also think we can state quite definitely some truths about God which Plato, hampered by the primitive state of astronomy, only ambiguously and with much hesitation almost saw. God is the soul or mind of which the cosmos is analogically the body (Timaeus and Laws, Bk. 10, etc.). These truths are very abstract; only God can fully know anything concrete, for instance you or me. We know even ourselves only rather abstractly.
You and I are close to agreement on many important more or less abstract issues. For my special beliefs, some not yet published but to come out soon, I know the mathematics, mostly extremely simple, for example 16 and, by subdivision, 32, these being important numbers of the possible views about God, pro and con. The numbers are quite definite and exact. Again, views of mind and body, or mind and matter, are four, and (treating double negatives as positive) they reduce to one. I am the first complete “positivist.” As Whitehead says, disorder is as real as order, but both are forms of freedom, in each case limited only by other forms of freedom, which is the positive factor. Plato calls this factor “self-activity,” with Whitehead and Bergson I call it creativity, Plato did not, but we can reasonably, believe that it is pervasive, everywhere in nature and in God, the supreme form of freedom. Determinism, unfreedom, stoicism, necessitarianism, are all negations. So-called humanism is conceit, a hubris of our species. Divine freedom and ordinary or creaturely freedom are mutually supportive or complementary, there have to be both. This is the principle of polarity, it was proposed by people at least one of whom was no theist but it is accepted by many recent theists. Classical theism rejected it, misled by Aristotle’s unmoved mover. It is being replaced by neoclassical theism, God as the “most and best moved mover” (Rabbi Heschel and others). If this change is not important what is?
Again thanks for the book. It enables a quite elderly person to be up to date in some important matters.
Charles Hartshorne
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John E. Smith to Charles Hartshorne:
John E. Smith
An Open Letter to Charles Hartshorne
Dear Charles,
This letter is quite obviously a response to your open letter to Carl Sagan in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (5:4, 227-32). I think your letter is excellent and, as you know, I have on numerous occasions expressed agreement with you about the philosophical and theological positions you have taken and now reaffirm in your letter. I wish, moreover, to second your commendation of Professor Sagan for the brilliant way in which he has carried out the task of making scientific knowledge available to the educated public. And he has been able to do this without any of that “science made easy for laymen” tone so characteristic of similar attempts in the past.
Just as you had a particular reason for writing to Professor Sagan, I have such a reason for this letter, or, more accurately, two reasons that are closely connected. In view of your usually, shall I say, confident approach in philosophical discussion, you seem in your letter to be uncharacteristically acquiescent at two points. First, you follow without question Professor Sagan in speaking of what he calls “biases” that may limit his insight when, as it turns out, these “biases” represent fairly clearly delineated philosophical positions to which there are alternatives. Should we as philosophers allow that these positions are no more than “biases” and thus fall in step with the old positivist view that the sciences represent all fact while philosophy—with the exception of Positivism itself—is a subjective valuation of things? I do not say that you would accept any such view of philosophy, especially since you do maintain that there are important issues not to be resolved by physics as an empirical science. I am, however, uneasy when you are willing to regard as “biases” three of Sagan’s clearly philosophical views—reductive materialism, mechanism, and a complete empiricism that, as you say, would make the question of God’s existence an empirical rather than a metaphysical question. Is it perhaps that agreeing to call views “biases” is an ironic way of reminding Professor Sagan that he is engaged in “some philosophizing of his own”?
If so, I then go to my second point. While you are much concerned to offer your credentials as a scientist, something that is surely to your credit, you seem not to think that Professor Sagan has any obligation to present his credentials as a philosopher. I believe that this is a mistake. Scientists do not take their scientific authority with them when they involve themselves in philosophical issues, either inadvertently as is usually the case, or when they make explicit commentary on the ideas of philosophers. As regards the inadvertant [sic], recall Peirce’s comment that the only thing worse than a scientist with a bad metaphysics is one who does not think he has any metaphysics at all. As for explicit comment, consider some of the naive comments made by Einstein about Kant’s theory of knowledge, or the amateur treatment of philosophy by Piaget in his book about the illusions of philosophers.
The point that I would stress is that there is a discipline in philosophy which is not commanded by everyone whether scientist or not. You will recall that Paul Weiss often insisted that it is possible to make “errors” in philosophical thinking and that is largely because there are good reasons in support of some alternatives that are lacking in the case of others. Peirce, for example, made out a very good case to show that the nominalism and positivism supposed to be the philosophy underlying science does not make it intelligible at all. What is needed instead, he argued, is some form of realism that can account for real kinds, an order of nature and not just “natural laws,” and the real possibilities that make mechanical determinism false. I am loath to call philosophical conclusions of this sort “biases” as if they were no more than matters of personal preference or selective emphasis. If philosophers themselves don’t ask for the credentials of those who involve themselves in philosophical issues, then we cannot expect anyone to show any respect for our discipline.
John E. Smith
Yale University
Source:
The Journal Of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. VI, No. 4, 1992.
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Charles Hartshorne’s Reply to John E. Smith:
Dear John E. Smith,
Sagan answered my letter privately and so am I answering yours. He was cordial and included his novel, Contact, which strangely I had not heard of. It is well worth reading.
I’m not sure I agree with you that materialism is not a biased position. Literally, biased means diagonal, slanted. Metaphorically it means prejudiced. Now I do hold that materialism, reductive or not, is not possibly a correct view. Vacuous actuality, in Whitehead’s phrase, is nothing, bare nothing. Peirce said, materialism is that mode of philosophizing that leaves the world as unintelligible as it finds it. My Harvard teacher, Hocking, said something rather like this. Peirce also said, Mind is the sole self-intelligible thing, and is entitled to be taken as the fountain of existence. Plato said, where there is self-activity there is mind or psyche. He thought, however, there were parts of nature devoid of activity, like grains of sand simply lying motionless somewhere. We modern know the atoms or molecules in the sand are ever-active. The origin of materialism is not mysterious, we know why it occurred. Direct perception does not tell us what the perceived consists of. The word matter is no help here. Only divine perception could exhibit the extremely small, and indeed all non-divine perception is, as Leibniz said, confused or indistinct. Clerk Maxwell said, blurred.
Philosophers must not insult one another, but their doctrines are not equally reasonable, and what it was intelligent to think in one state of culture may no longer be so in a later one. You mention Kant; I consider his views on some matters of little more than antiquarian interest. He literally did not know what he meant by noumenon, not even (in the Nachlass) whether it was one entity or many. His word appearance (Erscheinung) has no genuine analogical meaning. It was not in the least like appearances in a mirror; Kant was a genius, and what he called the architecture of his system was grandiose, but it was farther from reality than are dreams, as Bergson shows us how to interpret them. K.’s statement about the starry skies and the ethical imperative was sublime. In some ways he was a very great and good person, but his cultural situation is gone, we cannot go back to it. Not only did he not have the evolutionary view of living things, he rejected a pre-Darwinian version of it because it conflicted with his definition of God, a definition recent Jewish and Christian theologians, and my Quaker and Episcopalian parents and other relatives, have regarded as a great mistake, namely an all-determining and timeless will cognizant of all temporal processes.
Coming back to Sagan, Spec. Philos. has, if I understand the slightly odd letter they wrote, accepted an essay of mine about S. and two other important scientists of our time that I take seriously, Weinberg and Edward Wilson (whom I do not know but whose writings I greatly admire.) I’m enormously busy with some other projects and cannot do anything more in response to you until they are out of the way. The essay in the Journal right after your brief one about quantum physics was over my head mathematically, but very illuminating in its conclusion. It illustrates what I call cultural change. (If Wigner is right we’ve not seen the last of such changes in physics.) The distinction in the article between potentiality and actuality is central to my metaphysics, also that between existence and actuality. Without the latter distinction the point of the ontological argument cannot be grasped. A Catholic theologian has well called this distinction my “break-through.” It came from Whitehead’s actual entities, but he never quite stated it, and his rejection of the ontological argument depends partly on that, and partly on his not knowing or considering with care what Leibniz, Descartes, and Gassendi wrote about the argument, all before Kant, who shows no careful reading of them or of Anselm himself. He read a minor but popular German author on this subject.
Another point: Descartes’ definition of mind as inextended was just wrong. As Zaner has pointed out, physical pains and pleasures are not nowhere (or nowhen), they can be tiny and very massive (few or not so few cells involved). The mind-body relation is genuine, but “vacuous actuality” adds only another and negative word. Mind-body can be mind-mind. Whitehead’s doubling of direct intuitions as feeling of feeling is no idle repetition; it is one of the greatest advances ever made. In my dissertation, when I knew nothing of Whitehead’s prehension I tried to say something like it, as did Bergson and Peirce, but Whitehead said it, adding that it is the most concrete form of relatedness from which all others are abstracted. Wh. made a few mistakes in using the word prehend which have caused trouble—thereby showing, like so many other great innovators, that he too was fallible, only an animal with, in his words, our ape-like consciousness. One of the priceless advantages of theists is that they can always remind themselves that they are not God. If an atheist says this, the meaning is too uncertain to amount to much. Like saying, I am not Zeus. Here too Plato was uniquely great, for he said first, God is the cosmic psyche or mind of which the body is the cosmos formed by all that is not the divine soul. Of Zeus where and what is the body? Whitehead’s perhaps greatest mistake was to reject Plato’s mind-body theological analogy, yet it fits his own account of the mind-body relation in the human and animal case far better than anything the ancient Greeks knew. Here I think of Chesterton’s stroke of rhetorical genius, missing the point “as if by magic.” One of my advantages over Whitehead has been that I have been exposed to incomparably more help in reading and understanding Plato; he relied on A.E. Taylor. I knew Taylor, visited him even, but I turned to c. 8 others on Plato as better, 3 in English, 4 American, 1 in Germany.
You speak of my confidence. As Popper, my greatest contemporary, says, worldly success is mostly a matter of luck; as a philosopher of religion he had the luck to be both Jewish and in a way Christian, both Austrian and English, indeed Sir Karl. He also taught in New Zealand. I had relatives early in this century who were Darwinians, entirely open to science but genuinely religious, thanks to three small, far from fundamentalist, religious groups, with no great interest in Augustine, Thomas, Luther, or Calvin, or in notions of Hell, and focused on behavior in life in this world between birth and death. Thanks to Harvard, I came to know well many gifted Jewish people and their beliefs. Rabbi Heschel is one of the two theologians I admire the most in this country, the other being Reinhold Niebuhr. That they were close friends for ten years, they and their wives (I knew Mrs. Heschel and Reinhold but not his wife) also helped me to have what my relatives lacked, the awareness that all religions are human, and should claim no monopoly on truth about God. Religious hegemony or imperialism is illicit; general revelation is everywhere. As Plato saw, divine incarnation is cosmic. The Mormons were right on some issues where most Christians have been wrong, and so was the author of the Book of Job, in which God is pervasive but there is not a whisper about a heaven or hell, or posthumous rewards and punishments. Nor is the divine life said to be non-temporal, rather the contrary.
My wife became a scholar in the history of Buddhism in Japan and through her I was drawn into intensive experiences of that religion in its Mahayana forms. Through a former Student, John Cobb, I got into touch with Chinese forms of Buddhism; at the University of Chicago a monk in a Hindu sect whose beliefs are strikingly similar to mine well-earned and under me received a degree by writing a thesis explaining these beliefs in terms quite intelligible to Western philosophers. Add my Fullbright-funded trip to Japan via India and what did I miss, unless Islam? Still I went to Teheran, read in translation several of their authors, in Colorado I came to know an expert on the Koran, as I did a Shinto priest in Japan and a charming scholar in Japanese Christianity in Kyoto. In a student named Reese I found a person who can internalize very diverse philosophical perspectives and write about them in excellent English. He almost taught himself German trying to translate from Fechner’s great work Zend-Avesta. Together we produced the book of readings called Philosophers Speak of God, which takes the reader around the world with writings expounding various forms of belief in God and also some of the great criticisms of this belief, some written several thousand years ago, some in this century. The book still sells after forty years. Hinduism was vigorously defended in the philosophy department at UT for some years after I came to it by one member, a Brahmin, and discussed in a more scholarly way by another member. A former Hindu turned Buddhist was also there. Both men from India were novelists as well as scholars, at home both in the East-Indian and the Western cultures. In all these intellectual adventures it is mere superstition to see merely my good management of my intellectual growth, or providential intervention; at every turn the insights made possible might not have been available. That I have lived nearly as long as I have was in several critical moments owing to improbably fortunate actions by doctors or hospital orderlies, one close to lethal when I had barely come of age and was about to die if the Heimlich maneuver had not been used. Heimlich was then not born if I recall his years correctly. To my much later letter he replied, “You were very fortunate.”
This letter may, or may not be, all you will get from me, though very likely not all from others, by your letter. Thanks for your interest. Whom should a writer thank if not his readers?
Having just looked you up in American Scholars, as I should have done long ago I feel I understand you much better. I had not guessed your relations to Columbia, Union, Vassar, Notre Dame, Marquette, Princeton, Harvard, Lecomte, de Nouy (me too), Kyoto (ditto). All I knew about was Yale. An impressive career. I learn you are 24 years younger.
My computer disobeys me. When I became 80, I began to say, longevity is my secret weapon. Plato would have understood this. He had only 80 yrs. To digest the history of philosophy takes longer now than then.
I still don’t know about your parents, etc. With R. P. Warren, the poet, I see one’s family as a good part of what made one possible. —CH
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END of Hartshorne-Sagan-Smith correspondence.
HyC