Auxier Discussion
Author(s): Adam Blatner, Randall Auxier, Tim Eastman, George Lucas and William Reese
Source: The Personalist Forum, Vol. 14, No. 2, The Hartshorne Centennial Conference (Fall
1998), pp. 133-140
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement
of American Philosophy
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Hartshorne 's Theory of Immortality 133
Auxier Discussion
Adam Blatner: There's an anecdote about Whitehead in his later years that
he really would make a point of praising people who had been novel and
bold, rather than simply parroting, even if that novel and bold was wrong.
I'm not so sure you're wrong. I do want to comment on one other point that
adds to your scheme, and that is also taken from Hartshorne's Wisdom as
Moderation. There may be these intermediate states?you mentioned and
alluded to them?and playing philosophically with that, of course, is like
dealing with very, very highly lubricated swine. But things such as karma,
things such as intermediate states of angelhood in which certain dimensions
of ego are continuously refined off, and other fantasies, cannot be excluded
in your scheme. I just wanted to mention that theme of intermediate states.
Randall Auxier: And I wouldn't want to exclude them. I just went on and
went straight for the hardest one, which is we go to heaven all at once. I
figure if I can make that one, then the intermediate states would be easier to
deal with. But, yes, I agree entirely with your point, and I wouldn't want to
do away with the notion of intermediate states. First of all, how could one
have warrant for knowing one way or the other, and, second of all, if it turns
out that the argument that I've given holds, then it's going to hold for
intermediate states, too. Then we just have the problem of what the forms
are. The basic forms of existential limitation is going to be the same, but the
forms of actual limitation could be transformed.
Blatner: Two points, very minor. One, bringing up the idea that merging can
know the future opens up another category of whether or not the future can
be known, and that's a different philosophical problem there. I wouldn't just
assume it. And the last point?and I'm not sure where to go with it?but
there's a lot of talk and thinking about "What is soul?" My own hunch is that
it's the individualized dimension of spirit that is somewhat compatible with
personhood?you might as you continue to play with these ideas wonder
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134 Randall E. Auxier
where is ego, where is soul, what is the differentiation, and how those
discriminations are useful. Thank you! Very stimulating.
Auxier: Let me respond to your second point. Trying to save the words
"soul" and "spirit" is quite beyond my concern. Part of the reason is the
more you know etymologically about those terms, the more confusing it
becomes and the more tied up in bad metaphysics it gets. However, I con
cede entirely your philosophical point which is that, yes, I think I'm talking
about the soul, and it could be that there's something like the spirit, too.
However, if I use those terms?although I wasn't afraid to talk about angels,
I guess I shouldn't be afraid of anything . . . [laughter]. But what you're
saying is certainly what I see myself as doing.
Tim Eastman: In regard to personhood, I tend to think of personhood as
something like the way in which we are unique historical beings, and given
that lived history and context, that pretty well defines fairly fully what makes
you uniquely you. So it seems like it is fairly adequate in many ways to
define what personhood could be. So then to?as you do?to tie that
personhood to a divine reference in divinity seems to me an addition that
really isn't necessary. So according to Ockham's razor, why not just leave
personhood as being a unique historical being or something like that.
Auxier: Actually, I hate to answer your criticism with a counterdemonstra
tion, but the counterdemonstration is this: It turns out that the more elegant
account is the one in which all actual persons depend upon a single form of
personhood. That's more parsimonious, and that's creatureliness. And that's
all I mean by personhood. In a very real sense, the world is a person; that
desk is a person: everything is a person in a sense. Anything that's the crea
ture is going to be a person. What could be more parsimonious than to have
one existential form of multiple actualities? The way you're telling the story,
I could only account for only one kind of actuality, and that's the familiar
personality of human persons. And so, by Ockham's razor, I have to cut your
account. Do you follow the logic?
Eastman: I don't think so. [laughter]
Auxier: Well, okay. Yes, George.
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Hartshorne 's Theory of Immortality 135
George Lucas: Randy, I want to echo what some of the others have said
about your wonderful paper. I truly enjoyed it.
Auxier: Well, I'm glad you liked it.
Lucas: It's extraordinary to think about some of these things.
Auxier: It's bizarre to think about some of them.
Lucas: And in that spirit of humility, I guess, you can enter into the fun in
trying to see what these things can do for you there. I'm not sure that?as I
listen to you describe dipolar immortality and then personality?that you can
have existential personhood play the role that it does, and have your
complete description of dipolar immortality survive. And here's why. It
seems to me that personality is itself dipolar, whether God's or ours.
Immanent/transcendent, relative/absolute, all kinds of contrasting pairs
apply. However, the important one is the physical pole of that spirit, whether
God's or ours or any other person's, that is a necessary condition is embodi
ment. And if that's so, then God is embodied as Hartshorne has described,
clearly, in ourselves and in the world in a variety of ways. So that if you turn
back to your notion of dipolar immortality, what is happening at death is not
the removing of limitations but the removing of one of the poles. And it may
still be true that your experience, its cumulative content, and its ongoingness
survive in God's experience even more perfectly than in your own, but God
loses in a sense, in that God is deprived?again, if I've followed all of this
correctly, God is deprived of a mode, a physical pole, which is a possibility
of the source of experience in the divine life. Now that doesn't mean that
that loss is irreparable any more than the loss of any one of ourselves?
Auxier: That's why we evolve and reproduce?
Lucas: ?exactly, it merely means that for the individual, there would be no
more possibility of being a source of new experiences in the divine life; there
would only be the source of surviving and continuing experiences one had
whether one shared through God with others, but not contributing, as it were,
anything new. So it seems to me that it's wrong to say that you are losing a
limitation, rather you become limited on your notion of immortality; you
cease to be able yourself, as a mode of existential personhood, to provide
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136 Randall E. Auxier
any new experiences in the divine life other than what your actual life, your
physical life had to offer.
Auxier: That is the obvious argument that needs to be made against the
account that I gave. In some ways, I did address it, but I did not explicitly
say what I was doing. I am rejecting the idea that God is embodied?I think
that's a mistake, and I'm rejecting the idea that embodiment is one of the
poles. But you are entirely right to notice that. I just didn't have time to get
to that other argument. In the published version, it should probably be there.
Lucas: So you fundamentally reject the notion that embodiment is a
necessary condition for personhood.
Auxier: Embodiment is not a necessary condition for personal experience;
it is a necessary condition for personality. And I think that's consistent with
Hartshorne's metaphysics, and the reason is that occasions of experience, at
least in Whitehead's sense, are not univocally describable as either physical
or mental. Now that's a place on which Hartshorne deviates from White
head?and is quite willing to think of the occasion of experience as a little
chunk of some physical stuff, and I think that's a mistake. To bring it up
here, first of all, opens up a can of worms that we can't possibly begin to
explore the depths of, but a lot of it has to do with the fact that when you get
right down to it, I'm an idealist and Hartshorne isn't.
Lucas: Aha! That would follow.
Auxier: Hartshorne says "mind only," and I think he honestly believes it, but
he doesn't consistently maintain it, and I'm trying to. Yes, Bill Reese.
William Reese: I just want some further help from you on this, and it's clear
that Hartshorne's objective immortality comes from the Whiteheadian mo
dality of time?possibility becoming actuality, becoming part of the fixed
past?
Auxier: Yes.
Reese: ?I have a little trouble separating the fixed past from the consequent
nature of God?they seem to be the same thing?but on the other hand, it
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Hartshorne 's Theory of Immortality 137
seems to me that Whitehead's argument is really very good for this notion
of a past that's fixed, and so objective immortality, in the modal view of
time, seems to follow as a necessary result. But you take a step beyond that,
and what Hartshorne means by metaphysics is the putting together of
necessary truths, and I guess the problem I've got is that while what you're
adding seems to be a likely story, I don't see how it falls as anything like a
necessity. So I'd like to go back to the objective immortality idea and say
now, show me how there is some kind of necessity that can take me beyond
that.
Auxier: I left out a quote, Bill. It's a methodological principle for
Hartshorne studies, but it's more than that for me and you and for exploring
genuine philosophical problems. That is, one of the quotes that I didn't read
was to assert either pole of a fundamental contrast is to assert both poles.
That's a methodological principle in Hartshorne's view. I suggest that in
asserting only objective immortality, he's violating that principle.
Reese: Why?
Auxier: Why? Because to assert objective immortality is to assert subjective
immortality.
Reese: Why?
Auxier: Because to assert either pole of a fundamental contrast is to assert
both poles. Now, that's the simple Hartshorne studies answer. The more
complicated answer is that Hartshorne's God and Whitehead's God are not
similar. Bill [Myers] is about to give us a paper on that. Hartshorne's God
is the personal God of religion. Whitehead's God is a lot more mysterious
and a lot bigger, and to the extent that Whitehead is willing to tell us features
of that God, he always qualifies and qualifies and qualifies what he's about
to say because he's going to have to say it in language. And that bothers
Whitehead, much more so than it does Hartshorne. Hartshorne is willing to
take as axiomatic that God is love. Whitehead just wouldn't say anything
like that as axiomatic. And because of that difference, I've been able to
exploit the "God is love" notion and the things that go along with love and
the methodological principle of asserting either pole in order to tell this
likely story. But your point is absolutely correct?it's nothing more than a
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138 Randall E. Auxier
likely story. That's why I started as saying that Hartshorne's God is as
proven as any God can be, much more so than Whitehead's is. Part of the
reason is that Hartshorne has exerted seventy-some-odd years in the effort
to prove it. So I think it's more proven than Aquinas' s, it's more proven than
any other God in the history of Western thought, and, if that's the case, then,
if you still don't believe in God, I can't do any more for you than Hartshorne
already has. And not just believe in God, but believe in Hartshorne's God.
[laughter]
Reese: I think I would rather say that the difference between Hartshorne and
Whitehead is that Whitehead does cosmology as he says at the start of
Process and Reality, and Hartshorne does ontology?Whitehead does
cosmology, Hartshorne does ontology.
Auxier: Hartshorne does metaphysics and ontology.
Reese: One's doing an analysis of being and the other's doing an analysis of
becoming, or something. One starts with the actual world, and Hartshorne
is a little bit more a priori?
Auxier: That is certainly true. I have a paper coming out on that issue,1 but
the fast answer to the question that you are about to ask, Bill, is this
?Hartshorne is willing to take over Peirce's cosmology. And that's where
he gets the "God is love" thing.
Reese: I see.
Auxier: He quotes Peirce on that continually, and Peirce's cosmology of
evolutionary love is taken up and in fact many ways presupposed in Harts
horne's work. And so it's true that he doesn't do the cosmology, but he pre
supposes one.
Reese: By the way, I saw that Nobo adds Peirce to Whitehead and sort of
gets the whole cosmic thing going. But let me go back to the problem that
1. "God, Process, and Persons: Charles Hartshorne and Personalism," Process
Studies 27.3-4 (1998): 175-99.
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Hartshorne 's Theory of Immortality 139
I've got, here, just a little bit. I was trying to see how this objective immor
tality might work. So part of the problem, it seems to me, about objective
immortality is that as your life becomes fixed and it reaches the end of its
arch and everything, the variables become values, the subjectivity leaves it,
and now it becomes part of the fully objective past, and subjectivity remains
as God's relating to all of this, keeping the subjectivity in a certain kind of
way, but subjectivity doesn't change. So, it did occur to me that, possibly,
if the past retains any subjectivity through the divine, it could be that we in
the string of our lives could relate to those subjective events, say, friends of
ours who have passed on in life and really relate to their continuing
unchanging lives in the past, but maybe lose this notion that no events are
going to be added to that so you could remain in touch. I mean, that could
really be part of your life, and that could certainly help this. So you could
relate to the past in that way. In a way it seems to me that the Chinese
worshipping their ancestors could be just that?it's keeping them related to
those very important events in the past that are defining characteristics of
themselves. Their whole being requires relating to that in a certain way. My
problem about Hartshorne having this conversation with Kant is just exactly
it seems to me that you don't have a locus in which this conversation could
go forth....
Auxier: It would be a very, very fast conversation, [laughter]
Reese: Take me beyond to that necessary argument, to the necessity that I
think I can expect.
Auxier: I can't do that, Bill, in part for the reason that I'm not convinced by
my own argument. The arguments that you gave are the conglomerate of the
arguments that I have addressed, all rolled up together. I broke them down
in three pieces and addressed each one in turn, and showed how
creatureliness and personhood understood in certain ways answer each one
of those. But it's a cumulative case. We can always come up with more
objections, and I would have to come up with answers. I am of the convic
tion that a sufficiently articulated concept of personhood can answer
whatever objections you come up with. That's why m a personalist. But it's
not like I can prove it to you. I can't force you to say that "person" is the
fundamental category in the universe. What I can do is field the objections
as they come, and in a million different ways, all the way from Derek Parfit
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140 Randall E. Auxier
on the one hand to Hartshorne on the other. I mean, these are definitely poles
of personalism and everything in between; we have to meet those kinds of
objections. But if you are asking me to get you to a situation where you see
the necessity in it?it's words. I'm trading on words with you. And the
reason is, it turns out that in order to communicate with one another in our
current form, I'm going to have to use very, very indirect means to do it.
Things like words. I cannot get you to see the necessity. If you feel it in your
bowels, then okay. But I don't even feel the necessity in my bowels. What
I see are some arguments. I see things that are reasonable and match with my
deepest convictions and intuitions about things. I don't even know why I'm
a theist. But what I do know is that in Hartshorne's work, I find reason to
remain one. But that's the best I can do for you.
End discussion.
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