| III. The Two Strands in Historical Theology | Index | V. The Theological Analogies and the Cosmic Organism |
Author: Charles Hartshorne
[p. 142]
It is extraordinary how limited is the human conception of God. Men are afraid to ascribe to him inner conflict and tragedy characteristic of all life, the longing for his other, for the birth of man. . . . Self-sufficiency, stony immobility, . . . the demand for continual submission are qualities which the Christian religion considers vicious and sinful, though it calmly ascribes them to God. It becomes impossible to follow the Gospel injunction, “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect.” That which in God is regarded as a sign of perfection, in man is considered an imperfection. . . . To deny tragedy in the divine life is only possible at the cost of denying Christ.
Nicolas Berdyaev, in The Destiny of Man
The relations between goodness and theistic belief have been conceived in ways that are extraordinarily various. The main European tradition is, of course, the supposition that atheism or agnosticism connotes moral disintegration. But not only does experience present what to most of us appear to be more or less flagrant instances to the contrary, it even suggests to certain persons a very real connection between some of the most unethical aspects of modern life and belief in God. Those who profit most by social injustices have only to recall that since God’s in his heaven, all must be right with the world. Those who have reasons of their own for opposing social change have only to reflect that the Orderer of all things is above time and change, and that all possible value is realized — despite the seeming evils of the world —in the eternal perfection of the Creator. Those, again, who have power of such a kind and degree as virtually to enslave their fellows point to the absolute righteousness [p. 143] of the Dispenser of all powers. Moreover, those who are on the other side of social inequalities tend to accept these religious apologies for their misfortunes, and to console themselves with the hope of restitution in a future life. Thus the chief use of faith seems to be to disarm criticism of social arrangements — to promote smugness in the fortunate and stoical resignation in those deprived of the means of life on a really human plane.
Another type of ethical objection to theism questions its compatibility with intellectual honesty, in the exacting sense which scientific progress has given to that conception. Can a mind which permits itself to accept a belief so devoid of scientific foundation as theism has been shown by Hume, Kant, and many others to be, really maintain, with respect to its other interests, the critical alertness and integrity which ethics must regard as an important duty, perhaps as the foundation of all other duties? Furthermore, how can the effort to maintain a belief so beset with obstacles fail to drain off much of the best energy of the mind which might otherwise be more profitably expended? Are not those theists who escape ethical nullity in the form of smugness rendered no less its victims in the form of anxious and exhausting absorption in metaphysical preoccupations?
It is further said that so far from being able to illuminate ethics, theology presupposes and merely applies an ethic. For we cannot infer what is good from our concept of God unless we know that God is good, and how can we know what this means unless we know what “good” is independently of our theology? This seems unanswerable, yet it is a fallacy. For to conceive the goodness of God is to make an ethical experiment which cannot otherwise be made, namely, the experiment of trying to extend our concept of goodness to the maximal degree, the infinite case, in order [p. 144] to see whether the concept thus extended can meet the requirements of this most exacting of all applications. These requirements are not merely ethical, their fulfillment is not judged by the ethical sense alone; for they are also cosmological or metaphysical, and their fulfillment is to be certified by the metaphysician as well as the moralist. Thus we have an independent check on our ethical insight — the logic of metaphysical concepts; and we have an independent check on our metaphysical reasoning — our ethical sense. This interplay of inquiries is the chief merit of theological philosophy, and it cannot in equal degree be attained by non-theological systems for the simple reason that such systems do not, at least not so clearly and consistently, represent the supreme reality or cause as ethical in nature. They divorce the questions of cosmic reality and of the measure of goodness in such a fashion that the one question has little pertinence to the other. It is obviously the very essence of atheism, at least in all popular forms, to insist upon this divorce.
In general, the possibility of a theology depends upon the possibility of making our basic conceptions adequate to a supreme instance. ‘Thus, there cannot be a perfect love if love is such that it must necessarily be imperfect. One of the ways in which atheists sometimes put their conclusion into the concepts from which they affect to derive it is by so conceiving love that a divine instance of this concep: tion becomes impossible. The most drastic form of this procedure is the not unfamiliar one of denying that there is any genuine love at all, since in reality — it is suggested —all motivation comes back to self-enjoyment or self-interest. Not atheists alone have held to this doctrine. It has been set forth by revered bishops, who did not know that they were making nonsense of their religion.
Let us examine this view. To act rightly is, we are told, [p. 145] to act rationally, and this in turn is explained to mean, to act in accordance with enlightened self-interest. In other words, virtue is intelligence in the choice of means to one’s ends, all of which, it is held, are included in the supreme end, to promote one’s own welfare. If one is also urged to do good to others, it is because it is to one’s own interest to earn the good will of others, or because acting socially fulfills one’s interest by developing social impulses without which one is not a complete or happy human being.
The whole idea is unsatisfactory. There is no sufficient reason for the assertion that all of a man’s ends are included in the end of realizing his self-interest, unless self-interest is only aname for the sum of interests a man has. Of course a man can only do what, in some sense, he is interested in doing. But this does not prove that all he is interested in doing is to promote his own welfare, if this means anything more than that what he is interested in doing he is interested in doing. Suppose he takes an interest in sacrificing himself for his child or his loved one. You may say that satisfying this interest adds more to his welfare than the sacrifice subtracts. You may even argue that were this not the case the sacrifice could not be made, for to will the sacrifice is to find one’s greater good in it. But here there is an ambiguity, a very simple ambiguity which has yet escaped many great minds. It turns upon the time factor; as in general the neglect of temporal distinctions, the failure to “take time seriously,” is one of the chief defects of our intellectual tradition.
If a man desires to bring about a future state of affairs, then clearly the expectation of this state already gives him pleasure. We are bound to be pleased by the prospect of bringing about what we desire to bring about. But it does not follow that what we desire is our own state of now being pleased. On the contrary, it can never be that what [p. 146] is desired is the identical pleasure of desiring or expecting that which is desired, any more than when we assert a proposition, the proposition ever asserts simply, “This proposition is true.” If the state of affairs which is desired is future (and that is the definition of desire) and if the satisfaction of now contemplating the desired future is not future but present, then clearly the state of affairs desired is not the satisfaction we now take in desiring it. The present self always receives a reward from its every attitude and choice and effort; but the future goal of the attitude or choice or effort may or may not be a reward to the future self of the same human person. I may desire that I shall be comfortable in my old age, and to this end take out an annuity policy. From this action I now derive pleasure. I also may desire that in event of my death my dependents shall be comfortable, and to this end take out a life insurance policy. From this action too I derive pleasure, But if in the former case the goal was the future comfort of myself, in the latter it is, by the same principle, the future comfort of others; and in neither case is the pleasure now derived from the desire (and the effort to fulfill it) the object desired. It can be shown by many lines of reasoning that the future welfare of others can be a motive as direct and genuine as one’s own future welfare.
It is true that if a man reflects upon his own future welfare he will see that helping others is likely to contribute to that end; but it is also true that if he reflects upon the welfare of others he sees that it is likely to contribute to that if he helps himself; and if intelligent interest in self encourages one to take an interest in others, it is also profoundly true that one’s interest in oneself depends in great measure upon one’s interest in others. To believe, or rather halfbelieve (for no more than that is possible) , that one’s welfare is of no importance to others is to have little heart [p. 147] for furthering it, is in fact to be tempted to destroy oneself. ‘Thus for every relation to the self in terms of the future there is a parallel relation to others. There is sadism, but also masochism or self-torture. There is excessive concentration upon self-preservation, and excessive neglect of it, even extravagant absorption in the destiny of others — foolish altruism as well as foolish egoism.
It is certainly true that usually one expects to derive future as well as present pleasure from acts calculated to serve others. If a man who does not expect to die for a long time insures his life, it is perhaps partly with the thought that he will live more comfortably, knowing that if he should die his relatives will be cared for. Thus his own future welfare is also involved. But it is because he is interested in and desires the welfare of others that promoting their welfare contributes to his own, not vice versa; just as a man can think about his thought of x only if he thinks about x; he does not think about x because he thinks about his thought of x. Similarly, we desire to enjoy the fulfillment of our interests in others because we have those interests; we do not have them because we desire enjoyment. Without an initial interest in others a man would not know that other persons were real at all, or that he was himself a person in any significant sense.
Suppose a man expects to die shortly, perhaps in a few minutes. Often such a man takes the keenest interest in promoting the welfare of others (or hindering it) , for instance by making a kindly (or unkindly) will, or by confessing a crime so that an innocent man shall not suffer. Here the time he will have to enjoy the good deed (or the vengeful one) is negligible. The man is thinking not of what is due himself but (even if it be punishment) of what is due others. (There may be no thought of a future life.) To desire is to “take pleasure” in the thought of something. [p. 148] If the something is a state of future pleasure (or, in morbid cases, of pain) for oneself, the desire is a case of self-interest; if it is a state of pleasure (or pain) for others, the desire is, just as literally, a case of other-interest. In the only sense in which egoism or selfishness has a meaning and is possible, altruism is equally conceivable. The only incorrigible egoist whose self-interest is always served in every choice is the self of the present moment as now enjoying its choices. But this unfailing egoism is yet far from absolute, or enlightened self-interest would be as impossible as altruism. For enlightened self-interest means that something beyond present satisfaction becomes the goal of present satisfaction, and this something beyond may, according to all the facts, be either future self-satisfaction or future satisfaction to others. In other words, the only incorrigible egoist (the present self) is also an incorrigible altruist. The present self never acts merely for itself, but always also for some other self, and this may be either its “own” future self, the self not now existent which will bear its name, though clearly not simply identical with it, or else some “other” future self.
What unites the present self to others, its own future self included, is imagination. Those who cannot imagine what it will be to be old do not sympathize intensely with the old, even the old people they will some day be themselves. Those who can no longer imagine what it is like to be young care little for the emotions and needs of the young, even of themselves when they were young. They may have suffered as children; it matters little to them now. They may have been happy; they derive scant pleasure from that now.
“T guess I won’t worry myself much now about what won’t happen till I’m forty or fifty,” said William, “My teeth’ll last. my time, I guess.”
[p. 149] That brought a chuckle from Mr. Genesis. “Jes’ listen!” he exclaimed. “Young man think he ain’ nev’ goin’ be ole man. Else he think, ‘Dat ole man what I’m goin’ to be, dat ain’ goin’ be me ‘tall —dat goin’ be somebody else! What I care about dat ole man? I ain’t goin’ take caih of no teef fer him!" Yes, suh, an’ den when he git to be ole man, he say, “What become o’ dat young man I yoosta be? Where is dat young man agone to? He ‘uza fool, dats what — an’ I ain’t no fool, so he mus’ been somebody else, not me; but I do jes’ wish Thad him hyuh ‘bout two minutes — long enough to lam him fer not takin’ caih of my teef fer me!’ ”[1]
The very characters in a book and their joys and sorrows can easily mean more to us than our own remote past or future. Of course there are some who will argue that this is because we identify ourselves with the characters. Exactly! That is the point; that is altruism — participating in the life of another so that his needs become yours. Those who think to save egoism in this way are persons more interested in words than in ideas. They have given up everything in their doctrine except its label. Even to speak of “self-love” is to imply a difference between the self loving and the self loved, and that difference makes room for everything from one’s own future state to other persons, animals, God, as the self which may be loved.
The mechanism of all interest in any self, even one’s own self, is this: In representing to our present selves any emotion or desire, no matter what individual we suppose this emotion or desire to belong to (it may be a dog), we inevitably participate, to some extent, in the emotion or desire represented, and sympathize with it. This is true even in cruelty. To realize that we are making someone suffer we must in imagination suffer somewhat with him, even if in addition to this suffering—which may be slight, if the realization is not vivid — we also derive pleasure from the realization. As Spinoza said (and what psychologist [p. 150] would dispute it?), hatred and cruelty involve both pain and pleasure in the sufferings of others. The sympathetic character of imaginative realization is the very basis of there being any self at all. If in imagining what is coming in our lives we felt no sympathy for ourselves as destined to experience in such and such ways, we would have no self-interest, and no long-run-self as the goal of endeavor; and if in imagining the experiences of others we felt entirely unmoved by them, we would be social monsters, unrecognizable as human personalities. In fact “imagining” as so used is meaningless.
To take another example of the innumerable ways in which self and other self are scrambled together in motivation, why are we so pleased by flattery? After all, why should I feel benefited because another admires me? True, his admiration may lead him to help me in some useful way; but no one will argue that this is the essential charm of flattery. Even though I may need no help, I always like admiration. Why? Because in realizing the feeling of another toward me I tend to experience that feeling myself, I tend to enjoy myself with his enjoyment of me. It is not merely that this helps me to a pleasant belief in myself; it is also that I like to feel the happiness others enjoy in relation to me. Even if it be true that I like to have others admire me chiefly because this confirms my admiration of myself, it must be remembered that this is only because I have faith in the wisdom of the admirer, regard him as of some importance, a fellow human being with the same essential capacities as myself. And in so regarding him, I am implicitly accepting the legitimacy of his interests along with mine. Thus the seemingly highly egoistic desire to be admired is really shot through with altruistic elements; just as the purest altruism is not without some concern, however subordinate or slight, for the self.
[p. 151]
It is said that we always take some satisfaction in the misfortunes even of our best friends. But is it less true that we always feel some dissatisfaction, however slight, in the sorrows even of our worst enemies? Again, it is said that he who despises himself also esteems himself —as a despiser. Yes, but he who overesteems himself also despises himself in his heart — as a conceited person! Thus there is an equally valid altruistic counterpart for every piece of cynical egoism.
The ultimate motive is love, which has two equally fundamental aspects, self-love and love for others. Neither is ever in human affairs totally unmixed with the other; but either may predominate in a given case. Nor is this a mere empirical truth about man; any conceivable mind will be both egoistic and altruistic, for selfhood is social or nothing.
In one case there does seem to be such a thing as sheer self-interest. That is in the desire for one’s own physical enjoyment. In itself, bodily pleasure seems to have no reference beyond one’s own personality. Always, indeed, there is reference beyond the self-of-the-instant to the self that is to be, the self that will enjoy, as well as the self that does enjoy. But otherwise the social nature of the self seems, in physical pleasure, to be in abeyance. Yet this appearance is not necessarily final. It is perfectly possible to interpret physical pleasure as social with respect to individuals other than oneself. For in all human enjoyment a multitude of individuals of a non-human kind participate. These of course are the bodily cells, which in a sense are human, but equally are not “human beings.” In all our physical pleasures the cells are somehow involved; this is certain enough. How are they involved? The simplest, and I believe the only intelligible, answer is that the cells are involved because they also feel the pleasures in question, [p. 152] though of course feel them after their own fashion. The alternative is merely to say that the cells “cause” the pleasures; but, since Hume, causality is a concept seeking its datum, whereas the concept “feeling of feeling” has its datum in, for instance, the experience of remembering a pleasure and, in remembering it, enjoying it. We can well enough understand how feeling a feeling should partly determine the character of the feeling first mentioned, in a sense in which we do not understand what is meant by calling something the cause of feeling, unless cause really means the relation of feeling to feeling in “feeling of feeling.”
The notion that physical pleasure is enjoyed by the bodily cells, and participated in by us, is not a mere hypothesis, to be indirectly verified, but, like all philosophical ideas, is a hypothetical description of the immediately given. It claims to make explicit what we all, without definitely saying so to ourselves, already believe and know.
Now consider physical pleasures or pains as they are given. They have a certain localization in phenomenal space. They are given as “there,” as “objects,” to a certain extent, of our awareness of them. They have by virtue of this fact a certain detachment from the self. The self contemplates as well as endures them. With certain of the less definitely physical, the more subjective joys and sorrows, this detachment is more difficult or partially impossible. The subject is, rather than beholds, such affections. Here the effort to contemplate tends to destroy vividness. Physical pleasure and pain are by contrast partially objectified. But, since the being of a feeling is its integration into a self, if certain feelings possess “distance” or objectivity with respect to a given self, must they not have at least a semblance of functioning in more than one [p. 153] such integration? Distance from one self can only mean rapprochement toward another.
Plato seems to have divined the situation, characteristically without exploiting it in dogmatic or unambiguous fashion. According to him, fellowship is that which binds together gods and men and the entire universe. And there is the passage in the fifth book of the Republic:
That city is best which comes nearest to the condition of an individual man. Thus, when one of our fingers is hurt, the whole fellowship that spreads through the body up to the soul, and there forms an organized unity under the governing principle, is sensible of the hurt, and there is a universal and simultaneous feeling of pain in sympathy with the wounded part; and therefore we say that the man has a pain in his finger: and in speaking of any part of our frame whatsoever, the same account may be given of the pain felt when it suffers, and the pleasure felt when it is easy.
Plato of course need not have meant this description at all literally; but its vividness suggests to me that he had some intuition of the truth of what I am contending for. It could even be held that what Plato says here is much more literally true of the body than it could be of any possible city. Immediate sympathy such as reigns in the organism is not even possible in a society of human beings, whose social relations are largely mediated by highly indirect means of communication. The mechanisms of signaling from person to person involve transformations of what is to be communicated, so that, instead of concrete feeling, what actually “gets across” is some generalization, some abstract schema of feeling and sensation. Thus the “group mind” is more metaphorical than literal? But between a man and at least a part of his body, such as his nervous system, there is no mechanism. He communicates [p. 154] with these parts by a direct transaction which nothing further can explain, but which may well be the type of transaction which, adequately generalized, explains everything else.
On such a view, the ethically supreme standpoint, that of love, would be proved relevant even to the most private enjoyments, and the superiority of the “higher” satisfactions could be rendered in quantitative terms without violation of its essential meaning. For if the lowest human pleasure is social, inasmuch as it is a participation in the positive affective tone of bodily cells, the degree of realization of this social relationship, as such, is incomparably less than in the more explicit, imaginative, and rational participations. The old dilemma: either enjoyment is divided into two perfectly heterogeneous kinds, in which case there can be no rational basis for an integration of the two into a whole, the ethical life; or there is but one kind of pleasure, and then the sole basis of comparison is according to intensity and extensity — this dilemma dissolves as one grants that pleasures can be all of one kind and yet differ in a way that comes closer to the real meaning of “higher” and “Jower” than does mere intensity, or mere repetition later or in other subjects. As feeling of feeling, enjoyment varies not simply according to the intensity of the feelings so related, but according to the vividness with which the duality implied in the “of” relation is itself felt, and according to the level of the social “other” involved. The higher feelings are participations wherein that in which we participate is adequately distinguished from the participation, and reciprocally distinguishes itself —in short, explicit, mutually conscious, communion, “social” in the narrower or pregnant sense. Once this point of view is adequately grasped, the partial truth of the notion that intense feelings are superior to feebler ones can be recognized, [p. 155] in so far as one can agree that the right act is the one promising the more vivid as well as the more social enjoyment, not, however, necessarily to the agent, but to the ultimate referent of all really social motivation, the totality of members of the social community.
Self-love is not the key to the love of others. The key to all relationships is social integration, by which, more or less impartially, one recognizes in the present the significance of one’s own weal and woe in the future, or the appeal of the same values in one’s neighbor. Self-love is merely a particularly prominent — perhaps usually, but by no means invariably, the prominent — aspect among others of the absolute of absolutes, the bond of social rapport, by the conscious representation of which all conduct ought to be inspired. But this bond cannot intelligibly be thus regarded as the absolute motive unless it can be seen as the immanent principle of all values, however humble. The possibility of seeing it as such a principle appears to depend, we have seen, upon remembering that the constituent parts of the body are living individuals, that the union of mind and body is therefore the integration of life with life, and that this integration — since the essence of ¢ is most plausibly identified as feeling, irritability which is a fact for itself as well as for external spectators — is best interpreted as affectivity in immediate social rapport, or love in an embryonic stage. In agreement with a number of philosophers and scientists, I regard this socialpanpsychic principle as capable of general application to reality as such (see Beyond Humanism, Part II, and The Universal Orthodoxy, chapters on “The Formula of Immanence and Transcendence,” “The Synthesis of Extremes,” and “The Conflict and Convergence of Science and Theology”).
We have now to consider the ethical significance of the [p. 156] idea of the perfect or divine love. Ethics today generally accepts the assumption that among alternative modes of ¢action some are “better” than others in the sense that anyone vividly aware of the circumstances and probable consequences involved would prefer such better alternatives to their worse correlates. Now traditional theism posits among the circumstances of all acts the existence of an absolutely perfect being. It appears to follow inexorably that no act can, in its consequences, be better than any other, for in either case the outcome can be neither better nor worse than the hypothecated continued or eternal reality of a value from which real subtraction and to which real addition are meaningless. Love of such a God and ethical choice are mutually irrelevant. This is a paradox at the heart of medieval theism.
On the other hand, if we give up the idea of an existing perfection, we are confronted with an opposite difficulty. ¢ The probable consequences of an act which determine its ethical value are those which hold in the long run. But where shall we draw the line in this projection of an act into the future? What —to plunge to the heart of the matter — is the use of serving tomorrow’s good if, for all we know, the final state of things, however far off in the future, may be the complete destruction of all the values which our efforts have created? Those who object that in the meantime these values will have been really enjoyed seem to me unconsciously to smuggle in an assumption contrary to the hypothesis. For if, after the hypothetical final catastrophe, it would indeed be true that values would “have been” realized, and that this would be better than if they “had not been” realized, then surely some value would have escaped the allegedly complete catastrophe, namely, a sort of anonymous reminiscent savoring of past enjoyments. This assumption may be as inevitable as (is it [p. 157] not identical with?) the assumption that what occurs will always have occurred, or that the past is “immortal” in some sense. It is none the less true that, apart from the theistic idea of a cosmic memory, it is an assumption which we do not in the least understand. Moreover, I cannot for a moment take seriously those who say that they regard the future reduction of all values to the status of mere reminiscences, in a universe which will have ceased to create values, as an intelligible and credible conception. To believe is to stand ready to act ina certain way. Now no action, not even suicide, could express the belief in the possible eventual nullity of all action. I must politely decline to entertain the supposition that anyone, except in words, doubts the existence in nature of some factor which is incompatible with eventual unrelieved catastrophe, and in relation to which our acts have their long-run fundamental meaning. Some reliable tendency in nature toward the average production, even in the infinite long run, of greater value from acts which embody our best judgment than from those which do not is, so far as I can see, an inescapable implication of ethical concepts. To ignore the question of the ultimate long run, as do for instance many pragmatists, seems to be to evade an important issue. (The two earliest pragmatists, Peirce and James, did not evade it.[2])
Admitting for the moment that nature contains such a tendency, how is this to be understood? The simplest, perhaps the only, answer is the theistic one. If there is in nature a purposive intelligence, benevolently inclined toward other purposive beings, and so powerful that its destruction or utter defeat is impossible, then we have the required condition. At once, however, we face the di-, lemma: if the cosmic intelligence is perfect, then there can be no unrealized values, and action is once more nullified; [p. 158] and if the intelligence is imperfect, there seems no guarantee against its ultimate defeat or destruction. Only infinite power seems safe from the development of superior power or combination of powers. Thus, both a finite and an infinite God seem to elude ethical requirements. (The latter seems to have the additional disadvantage of suggesting callousness to the evils in the world, which omnipotence implies to be preventable evils.)
There is need for perfection, that we may have a cause infinitely worthy of our devotion. For though we may make reservations about all ordinary causes, there must be a deeper cause that we wholly accept (even though we cannot sharply formulate it) , or we are in so far not wholly ourselves in any act. Moreover, as ethics should note, this deficiency, though an ethical one, would not be our fault if no wholly acceptable cause exists. On the other hand, there is need for imperfection that we may remake the world to some purpose. The traditional theistic course has been to accept the paradox, with more or less indirection and glossing over, as insoluble. Traditional antitheism has denied, or as I should say, simply not noticed the (undeniable) need for perfection. But there is a third possibility. Perhaps “perfection” (or infinity) is ambiguous. Perhaps a being may be conceived as perfect in one sense and capable of increase in value in another.
Now in fact we have only to go, where theologians have too seldom betaken themselves, to experience, to find operating there an ideal of perfection which does not mean the possession once for all of all possible values. We do not say that a man’s love for his friend is, as love, defective because he must admit the presence in his friend of unrealized capacities. Yet we should never deny that the actualization of some of these capacities would provide new content for the love of which the friend is the object, nor that this new [p. 159] content would enrich aesthetically the value of the love — without for all that rendering it necessarily more complete or perfect in the moral sense. Adequacy, loyalty, to the given content, not the scope of the latter, constitutes perfection in the only sense in which love can, without selfcontradiction, be conceived as perfect. Owing largely to Greek influences, the medieval theists overlooked the essentially ethical meaning of the divine constancy as posited by Hebrew writers. Clearly it is unalterableness of character, not of value in the full sense of aesthetic enjoyment (with which indeed the Hebrews were all too little concerned) , that is meant by “in whom is no shadow of turning.”
The entire notion of deity as out of time is unethical, responds to no demand of ethical aspiration, centrally contradicts that aspiration. Granted an eternal moral fixity in the divine love, there remain as the sting of time precisely those genuine dangers and opportunities which give ethical choice its meaning, without the possibility of eventual complete nullification of efforts which would conflict with such meaning from an opposite angle. As for the melancholy destruction of values which has been lamented as the very essence of passage, it cannot occur except as memory is defective, and need not, therefore, occur at all for the divine memory. For such memory, as we have seen, there is ethical need. On the other hand, for complete prevision of the future in all its details there is no ethical need. General foreknowledge, corresponding to whatever degree of predeterminism exists in nature, is enough for any practically usable notion of providence; while foresight of absolute details would entirely eliminate temporal passage, and with it choice, activity, or purpose, in any intelligible senses. The ethical dimension would thus be banished altogether.
The idea of providence, conceived as issuing from a [p. 160] timelessly perfect being, has sometimes encouraged extreme conservatism — “whatever is, is right” — and sometimes doctrinaire progressivism, the distorted influence of which can still be seen in the views of Comte and Marx. The truth is that, given timeless perfection, the process of temporal values is an irrelevant and superfluous addition, whether it be a process uphill, downhill, or on the level. There is need for a view of the cosmic reason which will have more definite implications for human purposes, so that the dangerous sense of aimlessness which haunts the social sciences can be kept within bounds by a growing consciousness of a world goal into which human goals can be integrated. Here the conception of panpsychism again becomes relevant. This conception means that physics is only the behavioristic aspect of the lowest branch of comparative psychology. But it is more and more being realized that all psychology is in some sense social psychology, so that the final empirical science will be a generalized comparative sociology. The lowest known organisms have aspects that deserve to be called social. Whitehead has shown that the human individual himself is a society of occasions on his mental side, and a society of such societies on his bodily side, and a society of societies of societies altogether. This analysis brings abstract questions of motivation, of “self-interest” and “altruism,” down to a concrete level of definite relationships in terms of which the problems of human cooperation can be understood. Selfinterest as the absolute of behavior drops out, and the real limitations of social interest can be traced to their genuine relative causes, knowledge of which will tell us how far improvement is possible. And in any case the vision of a world social to its least units should prove an inspiration to cooperative behavior; whereas the notions of absolute atomic individuals together with the non-social interpretation [p. 161] of the “survival of the fittest” have obviously tended to promote egotism. So also have conceptions of God as purely absolute and self-sufficient —and hence even less capable of social relations than the most savage and competitive of beasts!
There is, however, a reason why theologians might easily be led —as Bishop Paley was— to suppose a perfect coincidence of love and self-interest. In God there is indeed a perfect agreement of altruism and egoism. For whatever good God may do to any being anywhere he himself, through his omniscient sympathy, will inevitably enjoy. The future welfare of all beings will be entirely included in the future satisfactions of God. Hence God can make no sacrifices, except in the sense that he does take upon himself the sufferings as well as the joys of his creatures. Theologians apparently sometimes overlooked the fact that such an agreement between love and self-interest depends upon the complete transparency or omniscience of the love. They held that omnipotence would be appropriately employed in producing in man a similarly perfect harmony of selfinterest and good will. But, even granting an immortal personal life for human beings, it still does not appear how a finite mind could be precisely rewarded for its virtue; for what is “precisely” to mean here? The precise reward I can conceive would be the enjoyment of the very happiness one contributes to another; but this presupposes perfect knowledge of the other’s inner life, and hence is possible only to God.
Why should not a finite member of the world society make some genuine sacrifices for the society? The greater good thus predominates over the lesser. And if you ask, What motive can inspire the sacrifice? the answer is clear: The will to the general good, the good of persons as such, oneself included, in short — love, the only motive that is [p. 162] self-justifying, since it expresses the attitude essential to the self’s being a self at all. God has no other motive; but in his case the total good of all persons is no more comprehensive than his own present and future welfare, this comprehensiveness of his personal good being his unique superiority rather than the general property of selves. The “interest in interests” (I take this phrase from C. W. Morris) is the final motive; but only one self includes all interests in its “own” interest, though all rational selves admit that it is interests as such, and not as one’s own, that one should have as end (wherever it is in one’s power to serve them) , even though one does not know how far one will ever oneself enjoy the achievement of the end when it has been attained.
The feeling that good men should not go unrewarded has a legitimate, though relative, meaning in the considera tion that there can be no greater good without particular personal goods, and that if in the very act of serving the good of others one normally and to an equal extent sacrificed one’s own, such service would interfere with one part of the general good while promoting another, so that the process would be futile. But, as an exceptional case, sacrifice, like other forms of evil, seems compatible with the idea ofa world fundamentally good and appropriate to rational endeavor. Perhaps the demand for absolute rewards is only a subtle manifestation of the desire to be God, omniscient and beyond the possibility of sacrifice or beyond the temptation to choose a lesser good for oneself as against a greater for another.
It follows from the above that if “ethical” means resistant to temptation, or willing to sacrifice joy (not just to suffer pain) for others, then in so far God is not ethical. But if it means being motivated by concern for the interests of others, then God alone is absolutely ethical; for to [p. 163] know interests, fully and concretely, and to share them are indistinguishable. The “simplicity” of God has here its true meaning, that there can be no duality of understanding and motivation in a being in which either understanding or motivation is perfect. Both come down to love pure and simple and indivisible. To fully sympathize with and to fully know the feelings of others are the same relation- * ship, separable in our human case only because there the “fully” never applies, and we never know the feelings of others but only have knowledge about them, abstract diagrams of how in rough, more or less general ways they feel. If we saw the individuality and vividness of the feeling, we would have the feeling. As Hume said, without perhaps knowing what a contribution to theology he was here making, the vivid idea of a feeling is in principle coincident with its “impression,” that is, with such a feeling as one’s own.
It is often maintained that the only really pure—or, at ~ least, the highest —love is that which springs from no “need” of the beloved, that which “overflows” from a purely self-sufficient being who derives nothing from any other. This is one of those apparently refined and superior thoughts of theologians which analysis shows to be really crude. Need and self-sufficiency have several senses and everything depends upon discriminating them. The need of the child for its mother is a need not for the beloved as such but for nourishment and other things to which the mother tends to be merely a means. God has no external environment which has the option of either serving him or” destroying him. Self-preservation is not a problem for the « necessary being. God “needs” only one thing from the creatures: the intrinsic beauty of their lives, that is, their . own true happiness, which is also his happiness through his perfect appreciation of theirs. This appreciation is love, [p. 164] not something extra as a motive to love. God “needs” happiness in which to share, not because the alternative is for him to cease to be, for this is not a possible alternative, but because the exact beauty of his own life varies with the amount of beauty in lives generally. Some other lives he must have, but his perfect power consists in this, that no matter what the creatures do with their free will they cannot bring about the destruction of the cosmos as such, they cannot reduce God to solitariness. All they can do is to determine how much each new event adds to the sum of event-values already stored in the memory of God. God has need for the maximum possible addition, not in the sense that he must have it “or else,” but in the sense that it s is to his interest to have it. His interest is the universal interest in interests, that is, love in the highest conceivable sense. It is not the interest in nothing, or the bare absence of interest, or interest in his own bare self-sufficiency or glory, whatever that (in the theological not the biblical version) may be.
The Trinity is supposed to meet the requirements of giving God an object of love which yet agrees with his absolute self-sufficiency, and also an object of love “worthy” to be loved with so perfect a love as the divine. This is done by making the lover and the beloved identical — yet not identical. But whatever be the truth of this idea— whose meaning seems to me just as problematic as its truth, for, once more, nonsense is only nonsense, however you put a halo around it —it leaves the essential problem of the divine love unsolved. For either God loves the creatures or he does not. If he does, then their interests contribute to his interests, for love means nothing more than this. If he does not, then the essence of the religious belief in God is sacrificed, and one still has the question, How then is God related to the creatures’ interests?
[p. 165]
The incarnation is supposed to solve the problem also. Ican only say that if it is Jesus as literally divine who loves men, really loves them, then my point, so far as I can see, is granted. If not, then the problem is unsolved. Instead of simply adding Jesus to an unreconstructed idea of a non-loving God, should we not take him as proof that God really is love — just that, without equivocation?
The idea that the highest love will love only an object equally exalted with itself seems contrary to all analogy. It is the highest terrestrial animal that takes an interest in the interests of the lower animals, sometimes even the lowest. “Worthy of love” is a rather silly phrase, if love means adequate awareness of the value of others, whatever that happens to be. Everything is completely worthy of love, that is, of having its interests fully appreciated. If its interests are not on a high level (e.g., if they are ultrasimple, or chaotic) , then complete love will not assign it to such a level but precisely to its proper level. Absolute adequacy to the object is the definition of perfect love, in the basic sense assumed in this book.
To speak of the religious ideal of love at the present juncture may seem dangerously irrelevant. Sentimental humanitarianism might, it seems, succeed only in smoothing the path of the oppressor, who will obliterate the humanitarian along with his sentiment. Now if religious love means sentimentalism, then I agree with those who regard it as an obstacle to the only type of advance now possible. But “love” as religion intends it is not a mere emotional glow toward others, nor is it a self-defeating program of attempting to deal with quarrels by offering appeasement to those who will not be appeased. Love is the effort to act upon adequate awareness of others, awareness at least as adequate ideally as one has of oneself. Love thy neighbor as thyself means, even better than one without religion can [p. 166] love himself, since we are first of all to love God and to make the relation of all men, including ourselves, to the divine love the key to their significance. So far from being fanciful or wishful dreaming, an unrealistic appraisal of things, religious love is action from social awareness, with the will to endless growth in such awareness toward the perfect social appreciations of God. It means pure and literal realism, provided the virtues of men and their potentialities for improvement and happiness as well as their liability to degeneration, their vices and misery, are included in what is real.
Which has caused the fearful catastrophes of the past decade — excess of social awareness and of the striving for it, or deficiency of these attitudes? Let us see. The German republic collapsed, students agree, partly because of its adherence to a theory of freedom which says, in effect, grant civil rights even to those who will use them to deprive others of these same rights, Is adherence to this theory an expression of social awareness or is it not rather just bad thinking? Of course one should appreciate, be socially aware of, the desire of some to deny to others the rights they claim for themselves, but since this desire conflicts with other desires of men with which one should also sympathize, one has to make an adjustment in which in some sense there results the least sacrifice of the desires sympathized with. Any other course shows a net deficiency, not a net excess, of social awareness. It shows a failure in so far to imitate the divine awareness, which feels all desires for what they are, and seeks the lesser sacrifice, the most valuable adjustment. To veto a desire is not necessarily to fail literally to sympathize with it; for sympathy only makes the desire in a manner one’s own, and even one’s own desire one may veto, because of other more valuable desires. [p. 167] Love makes all control of others also self-control, all , denial self-denial, it does not abolish control or denial.
Again, the German republic fell partly because of a theory of proportional representation which says, in effect, that the minority is to be ruled by the majority, but in such a way that any minority is always to be free to put such obstacles in the way of the will of the majority that that will is bound to come to nought, although the will of the minority will not come to anything either. This theory may seem to careless inspection like a corollary from the principle of social awareness, but really it contradicts it.
Why were the Germans first hindered by other peoples from succeeding in their democratic venture and then ineffectually opposed after they had given it up and made themselves into a self-announced threat to mankind? Clearly the reparation and guilt-admission sections of the Versailles treaty showed a lack not an excess of social awareness or even-handed sympathy. So did American tariff policy combined with a lending program that made unpayable debts inevitable. As to the ineffectual opposition to the subsequent tyranny, it does indeed seem clear that those pacifists who deduced absolute renunciation of military means from their conception of love were in effect staunch allies of Hitler rather than of his victims. But is this doctrinaire pacifism the expression of too much will to or achievement of social awareness? The saintly English pacifist who held that Hitler was not beyond the reach of kindly impulses because Hitler had been courteous to him personally scems to have shown in this argument the dominance of blind sentiment or of fanatical doctrinaire bias, rather than the reality of social appreciation. It is not love to deny what men are, rather it is love to get out of oneself sufficiently to see what they are. To try to keep [p. 168] life on a pleasant level by suggesting that tyrants are not so very bad, nor so very powerful or dangerous, may be preferring one’s own sentiment or theory to the achievement of social realization.
But there is the argument that love is not only a motive and goal, it is also a method, the only valid method, of influencing others. Yet to try to base one’s own action solely upon social awareness, and to wish that others might do so also, seems not necessarily to imply the exclusive use of the direct appeal to this attitude in others as means of expressing it in oneself and of promoting its growth in the world. Social realism — and unless that is what love is it is pernicious, and is besides unworthy to be used as the defining trait of deity — may enable us to see that to hand over the use of force to those inferior in love is to guarantee that there will be less and less social awareness in the end. To oppose by force is not necessarily to fail in social appreciation; one may be sorrowfully aware of what the force means to its victims, innocent or guilty. To deny this is merely to bear false witness against many noble soldiers, whose departures from love can be matched by those of other classes of men. There is evidence enough that dogmatic pacifism is often the expression of a preference for a certain enjoyable sentiment as against facing the tragedy of existence, which even God does not escape, and which we must all share together. To decide to shorten a man’s life (we all die) is not ipso facto to lack sympathy with his life as it really is, that is, to lack love for him. It may be to love not him less but someone else more, in comparison with the pacifist. Where lives come into fundamental conflict, sacrifice of life there will be, even if only by slow starvation. To fight without hate or indifference may be hard, but so is it hard to do business or compete for honors in art, or to live at all, without envy, callousness, [p. 169] willful blindness to others. Love, being in its literalness ¢ the unique privilege of deity, is infinitely difficult. Many a pacifist is clearly no model of love. The few really noble ones can be easily matched by the nobler warriors, so far as my observations go at least. And theoretically I do not sce why we should expect otherwise.
From all this it does not follow that war is not a tremendous evil, but only that there are even worse ones, just as liberty for others is sometimes better than life for oneself. Nor does it follow that most of those who take to the , sword have a justification in love for doing so. Nothing is more horrible than the lightness with which men have been slaughtered, even on the merest whim. Indeed a just objection to sheer pacifism is that by making war as such the greatest possible evil it puts discrimination as to wars and their causes to sleep even more effectively than does extreme militarism. If to fight is ipso facto to give up love, then it is vain to ask, Does this particular cause right: fully demand military support from the loving or does it not? All such discrimination between causes is left to others by pacifists, who naturally enough like to point out the virtues of the bad causes and the vices of the good ones until all comparative judgments, the only ones by which men can live, are discouraged and action ceases to have meaning. The field is then open to those who know too well what they prefer and also know how to get it — which the pacifists alas do not, whatever services they may perform in counteracting irresponsible militarism or in other ways. Undoubtedly, pacifists can remain more aware of some of the social realities than can those engaged in the military struggle. They can specialize in their sympathies. The soldier cannot dwell too much on the sufferings of the enemy, any more than a lawyer can be as aware of the interests of his client’s opponent as of those of his client. [p. 170] Only God can entirely avoid specialization of sympathy without falling into utter superficiality. What we have all to do is to try to see in abstract principle what the interests we have not concretely attended to require of us. As to this the pacifist has no monopoly.
As to the argument that the greatest exponents of love have been pacifists, that one cannot imagine Jesus leading men into battle, etc., I wish to venture a word or two. Can one imagine Jesus as a corporation lawyer or a policeman? After all, founding a religion is one thing, winning battles or law cases or arresting criminals another, but it does not follow that the principles of that religion condemn the other mentioned activities. Also it is not clear that the Jewish nation, had it fought the Romans, had a very valid cause of battle, including a reasonable chance of gaining the victory. The Roman Empire was probably the best organization of affairs available at the time. (Should anyone say this of the nazi empire today, he would, I think, be radically mistaken. Germany is strong enough to organize Europe by brute force and to enslave the whole to twenty million ruling-class Germans, and for this reason alone it would be better for Britain, which cannot control Europe except by getting it to control itself more or less cooperatively, to have the leading part in the beginning. The advantages would be not for a decade; they might be for a thousand years. Those who speak of the rebelling of the conquered do not tell us, even vaguely, how it is to be done.) Had Jesus a definite stand on military ethics it is strange that his only references to military affairs state nothing any militarist need deny, except as incontrovertible facts compel denial of one statement in its literal unqualified meaning. (Not all who take up the sword do perish by the sword.) And if the injunctions to love enemies and turn the other cheek have absolute scope and the [p. 171] meaning strict pacifism requires, then the pacifist must be ready to cooperate with anyone who sets out to take advantage of him. Who supposes that he will be ready actually to do this, to rely exclusively upon “heaping coals of fire” upon all men who are ready to infringe upon his rights? There is plenty of meaning left to these words, indeed all the real consistent meaning they ever can have, without any such literal absolutism being involved. The tendency to think revenge its own justification, resentment its own excuse for being, to meet injury with injury whether or not there is another, superior method for achieving important adjustments, is one of the greatest evils in life. No man ever threw such a bright light upon the possibilities for avoiding this evil as did Jesus. It is quite another matter to exclude the use of force even where no superior method can be found. And there are such occasions, as can be seen perfectly well today, when those who are not in favor of stopping aggression by force offer no alternative likely to stop itat all until the world is in the hands of the aggressors and pacifists will not even be allowed to argue any longer.
The career of Gandhi is another possible case from which to argue for pacifism. It is to be noted that Gandhi is admittedly a partisan, not just a lover of humanity. His cause is first of all India Now there may be a method superior to military resistance to wring freedom from the British. The British have the weapons, on the one hand, and they have a considerable willingness to extend justice, on the other. On the contrary, if the United States tries to deal with aggression by appeasement it will merely be despised for neglecting its huge potential capacity for armament, and will meet with an inability to understand even what we mean by the liberties we wish to preserve, and ought for mankind’s sake to preserve. With no little justice it will be said that we valued the comforts of peace, [p. 172] our automobiles and other material advantages, more than the defense of immaterial and priceless rights to religious, educational, and other forms of freedom. We will seem to care more about wealth or the immediate ease of following our habits of life and thought than about the long-run development of American life in accordance with American ideals.
The true role for pacifism lies in keeping in mind a goal for the nations, to be pursued by all means, including force, likely to lead to it, in which a place for all the peoples will be found. Not those who want to stop aggressor peoples as such are the enemies of humanity, but those who want to do it by the unscrupulous method of killing off troublesome populations, dismembering troublesome nations, and the like. The right combination of firmness and generosity which alone can really give lasting peace will require all the social awareness, all the love, that can be mustered. But mere generosity to the aggressor without regard to the need for freeing his victims will only be generosity coming to the rescue of ungenerosity as such, that is, it will be selfrefuting. To argue that any victors are bound to impose a vindictive, bad peace is relevant only if it be shown that there is a better alternative than to have another set of even less scrupulous victors impose a worse peace. A “peace without victory” might be the thing, but that is no help until it is shown how it can be achieved as other than a thin disguise for the victory of the wrong side, the side that doesn’t even want or profess to do justice.
In a heroic time dedicated to the salvation of freedom and the minimal conditions of human brotherhood, it is of service to recall a being to whom suffering is never alien, and who is the individual of all others the most tolerant of the variety of wills, the most ready to cooperate with [p. 173] their efforts, and the most free from the vain or stupid desire to have nothing to gain from the results of their initiative. Proud, willful, uncooperative men will never understand the gentle passivity of God, as weak and flabby men will never understand the energy of his resistance to the excesses of creaturely will at the point where these excesses threaten the destruction of creaturely vitality. The best expression of belief in God is an attitude of social awareness which treats all problems in the spirit of mutuality except where others insist upon treating them in another spirit, at which point we must in our local way, like God in his cosmic way, set limits by constraint to the destruction of mutuality. “Violence” and the constraints it imposes are surely not in the world merely through the fault of good men. It is better that many should die prematurely than that nearly all men should live in a permanent state of hostility or slavery. The divine love is social awareness and action from social awareness. Such action seems clearly to include the refusal to provide the unsocial with a monopoly upon the use of coercion. Coercion to prevent the use of coercion to destroy freedom generally is in no way action without social awareness but one of its crucial expressions. Freedom must not be free to destroy freedom. The logic of love is not the logic of pacifism or of the unheroic life.
| III. The Two Strands in Historical Theology | Index | V. The Theological Analogies and the Cosmic Organism |
From Booth Tarkington, Seventeen (Harper & Bros., 1915). p. 131. ↩︎
According to Peirce, rational action presupposes that our interests “embrace the whole community” and that this community “reach, however vaguely, beyond this geological epoch, beyond all bounds” (Papers, II, 654; also V, 952-37). Thus logic “inexorably requires” that we live for an everlasting goal. ↩︎