Why Metaphysics Matters - Hartshorne's Ultimate Contrasts

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Hartshorne’s Metaphysics of Ultimate Contrasts

Charles Hartshorne was interested in metaphysics and religion and was greatly influenced by the theological implications of Whitehead’s process ontology. Hartshorne went on to develop Whitehead’s ideas into what today is regarded as the field of “process theology,” which continues to be expanded both by Christian and Jewish theologians and has recently begun to be integrated with modern Buddhist thought with which it shares some parallels. Hartshorne translated Whitehead’s notion of prehension as “creative synthesis” which he saw as the fundamental cosmological principle, the largest nexus of which is simply “God.”  Perhaps even more significant, is that Hartshorne recognized that Whitehead’s work entailed a radically new and powerful metaphysics that seemed to eclipse everything that had come before. What Hartshorne exposed in Whitehead’s process ontology was a new metaphysics—a novel response to the dialectics of categories, that was neither the synthetic, pyramidal, up-ward move that came to dominate western reason, nor did it follow the eastern path of deconstructive analysis. Hartshorne noticed that when you start with the metaphysical categories, they always demonstrate a dialectic that cannot be resolved, because all our thought has been based on ultimate categories that are contrasting terms. In other words, the mind sets up a puzzle that is impossible to solve. Readers of this journal will be familiar with Wilber’s AQAL matrix, for example. It is a matrix of ultimate contrasts: interior/exterior; one/many; subject/object’ singular/plural; inside/outside. Whether or not Wilber considers these deep ontological structures is up for debate, since he seems to represent different positions at different times. To Hartshorne, however, the AQAL model clearly maps out the puzzle we’ve constructed with the categories of our mind. We have constructed in our minds, only a few boxes that are opposites of each other, into which we try to cram all of existence. Hartshorne realized that all our metaphysical categories come in one of two forms: there are relative terms, which he labelled r-terms, and there are absolute terms, which he labelled a-terms.[1]This alone was not significant. What is significant is that Hartshorne realized that when you start with experience, as Whitehead had proposed, instead of with the categories themselves, whole new insights emerged.

Hartshorne saw that the problem lies in looking at the categories as symmetrical contrasts. We looked at them as mutually-dependent terms, or as two sides of the same coin. This made them inherently irresolvable into persistently higher levels of meta-abstraction, or inevitably self-deconstructive when subjected to radical examination. What Hartshorne realized that when you start from experience, you discover that the categories are asymmetrically related contrasts—that they are mutually inter-dependent, but asymmetrically mutually inter-dependent. Let me give an easy example that we can build on as we go:

Let’s take the classic pair of ultimate contrasts that Nagarjuna worked with: form and emptiness. To say that “form is emptiness and emptiness is form” is to look at the categories as symmetrical. According to Hartshorne’s terms, “emptiness” is the a-term (as Nagarjuna’s system affirmed) and “form” is the r-term. “But” Hartshorne would ask Nagarjuna, “how did you get to your conclusion in actual experience?” “Well,” Nagarjuna replies, “take any form and subject it to deconstructive analysis….” “Wait just there,” Hartshorne interrupts. “What you are saying is that you start with form, but do you ever start with emptiness?” “Well, yes, you can start with emptiness,” Nagarjuna smartly replies, but then has to check himself: “but when you start with “emptiness” that is the “emptiness” which is conceptual, and so it too is a kind of form – a thought form.” “So,” says Hartshorne, “if we stay with the actual experience, we always start from some form, some r-term, in order to derive the a-term—“emptiness.” “Yes,” Nagarjuna agrees. “So, in some way, then the a-term is dependent upon the r-term, in some way emptiness is dependent on form in a way that form is not dependent on emptiness,” Hartshorne suggests. “Oh yes!” Nagarjuna agrees. And that changes everything!

Consider another example: the example of redness used above. We never actually experience “redness” we only experience things that are red. In this example, “redness” is the a-term, and “red things” is the r-term. There are many many red things but there is only one redness. Red things are given through experience, but redness can never be experienced—it can only be metaphysically abstracted from all the many experiences of redness into a category of mind. Redness is dependent on things in a completely different way than any red thing is dependent on redness. This turns almost everything we assume about the “ultimate” or “absolute” nature of reality on its head, because the tendency of the mind is to think that because a-terms are eternal, they are more real. But it is just the other way around. Because a-terms are eternal, they are only latently real, because their becoming actual depends upon experiencing the r-term and the pre-positioning of mind that “solidifies” or “reifies” them into an abstract category.

If we start with the categories, we tend to assign a kind of model based on container and what’s contained in them, which is based on the “power of the abstraction” to speak as if the abstract term were larger and inclusive. We use a kind of set-theory mental model to say that “redness” includes all “red things.” But if we talk from experience, we see that it is actually all the red things that include the red. It stands our metaphysical apparatus on its head! Now consider the list of ultimate contrasts that Hartshorne overturned[2]:

“Though polarities are ultimate,” Hawthorne (1983) writes, “it does not follow that the two poles are … on an equal status.” When considered merely as abstract concepts or metaphysical categories, they are in fact co-relative, mutually dependent poles. When considered from the standpoint of experience, however, a basic asymmetry is involved: a-terms depend upon r-terms in a different way than r-terms depend upon a-terms. Line 5 in table 1 tells us how to map a-terms and r-terms onto figure 3.  It tells us that as prior antecedents, perception and memory are a-terms; and as successors, a participation and imagination are r-terms. Line 2 shows us that perception and memory constitute the objects for their subjective correlates, participation and imagination. “That subjects are later (2r, 5r) and objects earlier (2a, 5a), will surprise many” Hartshorne (1983) writes,

It enshrines the doctrine that, both in memory and in perception, the given entities are antecedent events. As Bergson said, perhaps as the first, it is the past which is actual, there to be experienced. The present is nascent, it is coming into being, rather than in being, and there is no definite entity to prehend. Pierce hints at this. Whitehead, so far as I know, is the first thinker in all the world to take the position with full explicitness that experience is never simultaneous with its concrete objects but always subsequent. (p. 109)

What are some of the implications of a process metaphysics? Hartshorne writes:

Causality, substance, memory, perception, temporal succession, modality, are all but modulations of one principle of creative synthetic experiencing, feeding entirely upon its own prior products. This I regard as the most powerful metaphysical generalization ever accomplished. It has many men of genius back of it, including Bergson, perhaps Alexander, the Buddhists, and many others. But Whitehead is its greatest single creator. (p.107)

Process metaphysics reforms both eastern and western versions of Idealism. Both have religiously, spiritually, and metaphysically elevated the a-terms over the r-terms (which it often denigrates): absolute (over relative), cause (over effect), first cause (over proximate cause), universal (over particular), necessary, infinite, and eternal (over conditioned, finite, and temporary.) From a process metaphysical understanding, it means that religious, spiritual, and metaphysical idealism entails the exaltation of objects over subjects—things over process. Yet it would be mistake to conclude that process metaphysics merely reverses the bias. It would be more accurate to say that it transverses the subject-object dichotomy by making process prior to their delineation in a duration of prehension.

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[1] In the AQAL matrix, the terms “one,” “singular” are a-terms, while the terms “many” and “plural” are r-terms. But the mapping becomes counter-intuitive when considering the other terms. In Hartshorne’s process metaphysics, the matrix doesn’t spread out so nicely in a symmetric way: “subjects” and “exteriors” as well as “bodies” are r-terms, because they are prehending actors, whereas “objects” and “interiors” are a-terms, because they are products of the mind that pre-positions them as pehneomena.

[2] Hartshorne (1983) Creative Synthesis p. 100-101