Myers Discussion

Author(s): Adam Blatner, George Lucas, Marcus Clayton, Ed Towne, Chuck Krecz, Charles
Goodman and Sam Dunnam
Source: The Personalist Forum, Vol. 14, No. 2, The Hartshorne Centennial Conference (Fall
1998), pp. 191-198
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement
of American Philosophy
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20708788
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 Hartshorne, Whitehead, and the Religious Availability of God 191

Myers Discussion

Adam Blatner: As m thinking about you, I'm thinking about the mystical
Jewish tradition called Cabala?and the different levels of understanding.
There is a level of understanding in Cabala, especially as formed by the
cabalistic tree of life, that is highly abstract, and it's not even attributable by
rational reason; it's got there by mystical vision. But when you talk about the /
Whiteheadian themes, I was struck by the idea that the two are not so much
necessarily incompatible, as that they are accessible at different levels of
consciousness....

Myers: You're talking about Whitehead and Hartshorne's vision?

Blatner: Yes. I also want to say that I appreciate your earlier theme, which
I think is probably the most relevant challenge of process philosophy, which
is to move towards there being even a further bridge to move from the
abstract toward the concrete, a move to imagery, to juicy imagery, without
which people can't really relate on an emotional level. This is very tricky for
philosophers. But then to reground that imagery in the kind of philosophy
that allows people more freedom from obsessive dogma. So, thank you.

Myers: You're welcome. George?

George Lucas: I don't know how to put this exactly. I'm troubled by one
thing, and that is what religious availability comes to.

Myers: I knew someone was going to ask that.

Lucas: Well, I think you did a wonderful job doing something that it
surprises me more people don't do, and that is call attention to the sharp
contrasts between Whitehead and Hartshorne on all these points. And I have

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 192 William T. Myers

to grant you that Hartshorne's God is the personal God, and Whitehead's is
not necessarily developed. And that you can think of, with Sherburne, a
system similar to Whitehead's without God in a meaningful way, in a
plausible way, but it's ludicrous to even consider such a thing for
Hartshorne?there's nothing left of Hartshorne without God. And the
biblical background of process theism?I think you're right and probably
Lewis Ford is wrong that Hartshorne's is more certainly the God of
Abraham, Issac, and Jacob that I remember reading about with all the
delightful and interesting characteristics that you allude to. The question
would be?I think it's at that point?that's what I mean by religious
availability?something like the God that people traditionally worshipped
in Christianity and Judaism.

Myers: Let's say pre-Aquinas.

Lucas: Pre-Aquinas?okay. So here's the question. If you grant that

Hartshorne's is the personal, biblical God, why is that God religiously avail
able? It seems in a way that that God, particularly in Hartshorne's account,
is not so much capable of being, let's say, worshipped by us as perhaps being
indebted to human beings and other personal experiences because those are
the means by which God has experiences. God should be, in a sense, doing
the worshipping on Hartshorne's model. We should be religiously available
to that God. It seems like Whitehead, the more mystical notion, is in a way
more traditionally what one, especially a mystic, would think of as being
religiously available because it's a divine principle; it's ineffable in certain
ways. It makes the world possible, but it isn't involved like a person.

Myers: But you see, George, I find that mystifying, in some sense, as to why
that sort of grand, abstract, mystical thing, as to how that can be the God of
religion. It may be a temperamental question on my own part. For me, the
Hartshorne God, that tradition through Abraham and Issac and that very
strong Western tradition?when I think of God, that's what I think of. I can't
get around that.

Blatner: Well, Hartshorne himself says that "Sometimes I think of myself

more as a Buddhist, or a Buddhisto-Christian." So the early biblical God is
not the closest to his imagery when he talks. The quality of passion involved
between God and humanity, which is a useful image, is not that different

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 Hartshorne, Whitehead, and the Religious Availability of God 193

from some Hindu experience, Vishnu or Shiva, or the Song of Solomon. The
almost erotic feeling of "hey, we love each other." And it's almost very
different from the patriarchical God. So it doesn't necessarily have to be a
biblical God at all, or a Western God.

Myers: We might want to say, though, that the strength of those various
ways into Hartshorne's God makes that God more open to other traditions,
to other strands, other ways of understanding God, that there is a richness
there that you don't see as much of in Whitehead. George, were you
finished?

Lucas: Just a thought. Does religious availability, then, cash out to nothing
more than a kind of sociological claim about the way certain groups of
people see God and respond towards the ultimate in their lives?

Myers: I would say perhaps, and that's okay.

Blatner: And psychological as much as sociological?

Myers: Certainly. Or more.

Marcus Clayton: I like your response to George. Do you mind if I give a

better one? [laughter]

Myers: Okay, I would be delighted.

Clayton: If God is indebted to us, and we need something to worship, why

shouldn't he accommodate us? [laughter]

Myers: Thank you, Marcus. Yes?

Ed Towne: You cited that passage where Hartshorne says the way that God
influences the world is by changing God's self. How can God influence the
world and influence us in the way we think about God? It would be interest
ing to me to find out how, metaphysically, the divine efficacy works?this
question goes to the lure, in Whiteheadian terminology?I would like to
know whether there is a metaphysical or empirical way of telling us that God
influences us.

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 194 William T. Myers

Myers: Empirical, probably not. Given Hartshorne's methodology and such.

Ed Towne: I see, but if, as Hartshorne says, the laws of nature are a form of
the divine efficacy, why wouldn't that be empirical?

Chuck Krecz: How would you prove it? At any rate, it wouldn't count on
any particular religion. That's the point about Whitehead. Whitehead's God
is continually at work, regardless of whatever religion happens to come on
the scene. I think to a certain extent that's true about what Hartshorne says.
But I wouldn't say that it's a more pleasing picture because it's more
adequate to the way in which you think about God for the simple reason that
I believe that is contingent. I believe. We might have a particular religious
tradition that we are counting on and relying on, but that's not adequacy.

Myers: Well, certainly, but I'm not arguing for anything beyond the
question of the religious adequacy. Presumably, Hartshorne's God would go
on working even if everyone became naturalists, in a Deweyan sense of that
term. Hartshorne's God just keeps on going, on and on and on.

Towne: We need to understand the difference between asserting that God

influences the world in such and such a way and saying where that can be
detected or how that is cashed out other than in the coherence of the
conceptual scheme.

Blatner: When we have a religious experience, we experience God directly.

Myers: For Hartshorne, we feel God. It's much deeper than anything
cognitive. We feel our possibilities as God's possibilities, is the way he puts
it. There's something here that is very beneath the cognitive. It's that feeling
of feeling idea.

Towne: Would it make sense, then, to say here that metaphysics has to dip
into phenomenology?

Myers: Yes, I think that is true.

Blatner: Or the direct spiritual experience on a certain level needs to include

the literature of the mystic's experience.

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 Hartshorne, Whitehead, and the Religious Availability of God 195

Myers: You know, Hartshorne would never, never deny the importance of
intuition. In fact, he has his thesis that every great philosopher has a novel
intuition. There's his essay on Whitehead?"Whitehead's Novel Intu
ition"?in which he claims that Whitehead's intuition is "the many become
one and are increased by one." He would by no means downplay the impor
tance and role of that, and that may be one starting point, and then you build
a metaphysics from that.

Charles Goodman: You brought up the discussion between Whitehead's

and Hartshorne's theories of universals. I don't understand the theory you're
attributing to Hartshorne. So let me try to ask you a clarifying question. The
way you described it seems to attribute to Hartshorne the view that,
regarding universals, there are particular ones of them that appear every time
there is a property instantiated, and there is nothing in common. Consider the
property, "having charge minus 1." Then each electron seems to have an
identical copy of that property; there are no degrees or other seeming
differences. So what would you say about this? Are there many, many
identical properties "having charge minus one" or is there one that just keeps
reappearing and is permanent?

Myers: By the reasoning in the Creative Synthesis, what he explicitly says

is that similarity is as ultimate as identity. Similarity is itself an ultimate kind
of notion. That's what he gets from nominalism. And you would seem to
have to say, even going beyond colors, that every instance is nonrepeatable.
His notion of universals is that they are emergent properties. So the answer
to your question is that I think every one is unique.

Goodman: Can you give any suggestion as to what that uniqueness, of each
instance of "having charge minus one" consists in?

Myers: Oh, I have no idea. We would have to ask him.

Auxier: I have a suggestion?creatureliness. Special creation. Each one has

a unique relation to God.

Myers: Each instance is a different one. There is the novelty of each

occasion of experience.

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 196 William T. Myers

Reese: Well, so far as you talk about similarity, Whitehead does distinguish
between eternal objects of the objective species and of the subjective
species. When it comes to color, he could say the same thing that Hartshorne
says, so that doesn't seem to be a difference.

Myers: But he doesn't.

Reese: Well, I think it's implicit in the notion of the subjective species. The
color red is going to be the color that you see.

Myers: But think about what he says in that passage I quoted from Science
and the Modern World, where he says, "color is eternal. It haunts time,
appearing where it is needed. Yet where ever it appears it is the same color."
That is very anti-Hartshornian.

Reese: It's the same color, but he doesn't say that it's the identical color.
Can't the same color have a range of instantiation?

Myers: Well, think about what he says. He always qualifies it with a

"particular" shade of green, or a "particular" shade of red. He admits that not
all greens are the same, but if you have two different shades, then those are
two different colors. But if you have a particular shade of green, from his
language, certainly in Science and the Modern World, and around page 80
in Process and Reality, he talks about Hume's example and such, so it looks
as if these are eternal. His language, I don't think, gives way to that, not the
way he describes it.

Reese: I thought that the difference between the objective species and the
subjective species is a lot like Locke's difference between primary qualities
and secondary qualities: primary qualities are objective and secondary qual
ities are not, but you apparently don't see it that way.

Myers: In looking at it, I went through and I looked at all the places where
Whitehead uses color as an example. This notion does seem that it's the
"greenness"?there it is?it appears where it's needed.

Reese: I'll have to check those passages and see.

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 Hartshorne, Whitehead, and the Religious Availability of God 197

Myers: Look around pages 80 or 81 where he discusses Hume in Process

and Reality and then those passages in Science and the Modern World.

Sam Du am: It seems to me that Whitehead is a lot richer, in this

sense?in that you can account for relationships, and yet in the events them
selves, in the immediate impulse of this instance, that instance, everyone is
really unique and particular, so Whitehead really accounts for both universal
and particular in his notion of the actual occasion, so I don't see why in the
world Hartshorne would have to particularize or give a shade of particulari
zation to eternal objects to capture their uniqueness. It's just unnecessary.

Myers: His argument for this is really very interesting. It's not really an
argument for it. He says "this just seems wrong to me," and that's about all
he says about it.

Reese: Well, I can remember Hartshorne in class so often saying, "well, I

don't see why this couldn't be the case." Apparently what he was looking for
was the notion of unity, and apparently this is part of his starting with the
idea of God instead of starting with the world, and I think you're right about
Whitehead starting with the world, and the beautiful thing about God being
a derivative notion is that you can get it by starting with the world. That is
to say, you have access to the idea if you follow Whitehead. But if you
follow Hartshorne, you start with the idea of God. And where does that come
from? It's sort of like the difference between Plato's way up and way down.
Whitehead starts with the world and is doing the way up, and Hartshorne
starts way up here and is doing the way down.

Myers: Well, you have to get back to the theistic proofs.

Reese: Well, yeah, but it's possible that they ought to meet somewhere in
between, and when they meet, they ought to agree. Now, I think you've
shown places where they seem not to agree, and I guess that's right, but then
the question is, is Hartshorne being a little bit metaphorical here, when he
says that the world is the body of God, and Whitehead wouldn't like to be
metaphorical in that way, or are they both trying to speak univocally, so I'm
not sure what happens here.

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 198 William T. Myers

Myers: Yeah, I'm not sure that, for Hartshorne, the world as God's body is
metaphorical at all. I think he means it. I think he means it, by golly.

Reese: But then, you see, there is a problem with Whitehead's relativity, the
principle of universal relativity, and Hartshorne recognizes that as being a
problem, and he doesn't quite know what to do with it. I argued with him
about that in my doctoral dissertation. He said, well, you know, maybe for
God it's not relative the way it is for everybody else and everything else.
But, you see, it seems to me that Whitehead would not be able to say that the
world is the body of God because the world isn't a body; the world is a
bunch of events, and each one has its own present moment, in a sense, and
it coalesces only as it becomes part of the past. So if the world was God's
body, or God's body the world, or something, it has to become past to be, so
there is this relativity problem that has to be overcome. Surely he recognizes
relativity.

Myers: When you were arguing about this with Hartshorne, was this during
the time when he argued that contemporary events could experience one
another? You know he changed his mind on that.

Reese: Well, I'll tell you it was so many decades ago, it's hard to remember.

Myers: Then it probably was. As I recall, I think Hartshorne changed his

mind in the early '70s about that.

Reese: This was in the mid '40s.

Myers: Yes, at that time, Hartshorne did have a greater problem with
relativity?

Reese: So, what? He gave up relativity? [laughter]

Myers: ?because of the notion of contemporaneousness, and he finally did

come to agree with Whitehead that contemporaries cannot prehend one
another.

End discussion.

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