Charles Hartshorne - Dipolar Theism

Charles Hartshorne - Dipolar Theism

Hartshorne contends that “God” is both necessary AND contingent. In brief, contingency expresses how God is, and necessity expresses that God is. Rather than thinking in absolute dualities, he breaks down the modalities of common philosophical binaries that have been used to describe both God and the world, and treats them not as an either/or choice. Further, he allows stochastic processes, that is randomness, to enter into his conception of God, quite distinct from Classical theology.

harvardsquarelibrary.org/Har … ey/12.html

What does one make of this asymmetrical treatment of these otherwise mutually exclusive pairs? And does Hartshorne succeed in resolving intellectually, the difficult dichotomies that Philosophy of Religion has long struggled with, and which mysticisms of every sort have expressed only gnomically?

Dunamis

Dunamis, I’m reading the Hartshorne paper right now, and it’s going pretty well, until I get to the Model. I’m having a hard time understanding why the lines are drawn just as they are. Can you shed some light on that?

The intersection of lines illustrate, I believe, Hartshorne’s assertion that the world and the Divine are in both necessarily contingent: the diagonal representing divine modalities and world actualities that are in symmetry, and the horizontal and vertical representing the various kinds of internal contingency and necessity relations between the divine and the world. His thought seems to be that the “condition of things” must be one of these 16 (adding the permutations described below in the essay), and only his position accepts the application of these two ultimate contrasts to both categories.

If it helps, Frankenberry describes it this way,

“In other words, the traditional categories according to which classic theists sought to affirm the difference between God and the world refer, for panentheism [Hartshorne], only to the abstract pole of the divine dipolarity, whereas all the action, or value, resides in the concrete pole which includes the abstract.”

Dunamis

Alright. It seems pretty solid to me,I suppose. But I wonder about God’s contingent qualities. We can tack contingent analytic qualities to God like, “Being such that Uccisore are french fries today”. We can do the same with the world and necessary qualities. I wonder, though, about more substantial qualities, like God’s goodness or wisdom. Are these part of God’s contingent states?

Hartshorne describes “God” in this way,

“a universally powerful though no all-determining freedom, itself with aspects of contingency and finitude, unsurpassingly influencing and as well as unsurpassingly influenced, an unborn and undying by not immutable Life able to appreciate and cherish everlastingly our, and all creatures’, experiences,” [N.F. and in this way] endow our fleeting days with abiding significance.”

Your question is a good one, and I suspect that our descriptions of “good” and “wise” would fall to contingent historicism, rather than categorical necessities. The significance and experience of the process, the registry of our acts, in certain regard, would seem both the grounds of both “good” and “wise” at the outer most limits of an anthropological sense.

Here is a more thorough overview of his life and thought,

plato.stanford.edu/entries/hartshorne/

Dunamis

The asymmetrical reality/order of the mutually exclusive pairs is logically contingent on the element of time, and the ‘two’, it seems, only exist in our realm of reality/universe. The imperfect half of that reality/order can not exist in an eternal state. A true eternal state must be devoid of imperfection, as imperfection is not perpetual, and has an ultimate end. Using the analogy of the boy (an imperfect state) asymmetrecally becomming a man (a perfect state)…we see that perfection is contingent on change from imperfection. This would only pertain to the creation which has not always existed, and is contingent upon the perfection of God for it’s very existence. As it pertains to man and his free-will, it seems to me that he must accept and/or grow into the condition of perfection in-order to step into eternity.

Hello F(r)iends,

I’ve always struggled to understand this kind of logic…
How can something be and not be at the same time?
How can something be black and be white or be black and be not black?

Or am I missing something between how Hartshorne explains the relation between necessary and contingent?

Why would god determine order and then cease to do so? How do Hartshorne’s contentions lead us to this conclusion? Who or what determines cosmic order after god ceases to determine it?

-Thirst4NC.nc

Thirst,

In this form of reasoning, the pairs describe different aspects or predicates of “God”. One describes the how of God, the other the that of God. I didn’t read the passage you reference, so I can’t comment on that specifically. But perhaps one could say that you have “authored” your last post, but you are not still “authoring” it presently. It a “that” sense, you still have and are authoring it, in that it is under your auspices; but in the “how” sense, we are authoring as we interpret it, it is unfolding in meaning. I am unsure if this is exactly what Hartshorne meant there, but it gives the sense of how things can be two things at the same time, depending on perspective. The Cosmos is ordered, but it also is ordering. Hartshorne also believed that God makes Cosmoses in huge epochs, making and remaking them in an infinite variation, avoiding both monotony and chaos, this may be the meaning of that brief passage.

Dunamis

It seems as though Hartshone is exploring cosmology in his own way. Here are a few words concerning what interested me.

It may not require an explanation but there is nothing wrong with pondering it as far as our modes of perception allow.

I see it differently. Beauty is a perception of ours indicating an objective reality behind it. By itself, it can be misleading. To say that God created for the purpose of creating beauty is to ignore what is behind it. IMO creation was a necessity not to relieve monotony but to retain experiential potential or God’s “volume”. “Use it or lose it.”

Yes but it is not exact owing to the nature of the Law of Octaves as expressed by Pythagoras. The vibratory distance between each interval is not the same so the do at the beginning of the octave is not an exact relationship to the do at the end producing what appears to be an asymmetrical relationship. This is rough stuff to just walk into if not accustomed so I’ll post a link that introduces this idea.

sacred-texts.com/eso/sta/sta19.htm

We’re making progress. :slight_smile:

Also, it is easy to consider cause and effect as one to one. But I’ve come to believe that the unique phenomenon of a note on the octave, take “mi” for example is determined by the vibratory qualities of what is directly above and below on the scale and in this case: re and fa. An “effect” then is a middle between two qualities.

Cosmologically, in the context of “being”, this means that each cosmos is defined by the cosmos directly above and directly below it. “As above, so below” is then considered from the perspective of the “middle.” All created things are middles which though asymmetrical are related by the Law of Octaves.

"
Yes but it is not exact owing to the nature of the Law of Octaves as expressed by Pythagoras. The vibratory distance between each interval is not the same so the do at the beginning of the octave is not an exact relationship to the do at the end producing what appears to be an asymmetrical relationship. This is rough stuff to just walk into if not accustomed so I’ll post a link that introduces this idea.

But I’ve come to believe that the unique phenomenon of a note on the octave, take “mi” for example is determined by the vibratory qualities of what is directly above and below on the scale and in this case: re and fa. An “effect” then is a middle between two qualities.

Cosmologically, in the context of “being”, this means that each cosmos is defined by the cosmos directly above and directly below it. “As above, so below” is then considered from the perspective of the “middle.” All created things are middles which though asymmetrical are related by the Law of Octaves."

By rumored report: All you know is that you know Nothing. That’s a lot of nothing.

Dunamis