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RELIGION AND CREATIVE EXPERIENCE
by Charles Hartshorne
That man has a certain creative power is a commonplace nowadays. Making
the most of this power is what is termed “living creatively.”
Not only is creativity a widely recognized ideal for human action, it
is also the first principle of the most daring and powerful philosophical
system of this century, that of Whitehead, and Whitehead was preceded
in this by other less notable philosophers.
For these philosophers, to be is to create; it is impossible to exist
at all in absolutely uncreative fashion. From atoms to deity, all things
in their degree and kind act creatively. I believe that we have in this
rather new type of philosophy an intellectual basis for religion far
superior to any other. Unfortunately only a few, even among professional
philosophers, have as yet a clear idea of this way of thinking.
First, what is it to create? Whitehead takes as his primary example
the process of human experiencing. His doctrine is simple: to experience
is to create. What is the resulting product? Experience itself. Each
experience is something new and unique, and to experience is always
a free production of novelty. Bergson had already said this, but Whitehead
makes it the central category of an ambitious system.
People have looked for freedom in action, and of course freedom must
somehow show up in action. Still, the first stage of free action is
the way in which we interpret or experience the world. Only you or I
can determine our own way of feeling and thinking our environment. The
utmost slave has some freedom here which none can wholly suppress while
the slave is alive. No matter how others coerce or persuade, he or she
finally must make a unique and unpredictable response to the stimuli
others bring to bear.
It is vain to talk about psychological prediction as an absolute; for
even after an experience has taken place not all the words in all languages
could precisely describe that experience; and what cannot be said even
afterwards certainly cannot be said in advance. Suppose that a person
grows angry, as we have predicted. There are as many forms and qualities
of angry experience as there are cases, and only more or less rough
and crude descriptions of their differences are possible.
Every experience is in some degree an unpredictable novelty. The stimuli
molding an experience are many: the five or nine senses are operating;
memory is relating us, at least unconsciously, to thousands of incidents
of the past; but this multiplicity of influences is to produce a single
unitary experience. The effect is one; the causes, however, are always
many. This vast multitude of factors must flow together to produce a
single new entity, the experience of the moment. By no magic can casual
laws derive this new unity from the previous multiplicity. Certainly,
the many stimuli tell us much about the response, but it is a logical
impossibility that they should tell us all. An emergent synthesis is
needed to decide just how each item is to blend in a single complex
sensory-emotional-intellectual whole, the experience. Any motives are
either but items going into the synthesis, or else they are the synthesis.
To experience must be a free act, or nothing intelligible.
Why is this not more generally realized? In part, because we have our
minds chiefly upon the more important and exceptional modes of creativity,
and so we overlook the humbler ones which are always there, like the
man in Moliere who did not realize that he had been talking “prose”
all his life. Freedom is always there, but the unusual kinds and degrees
of freedom are not always there. While it is indeed important to distinguish
between the higher and lower forms of freedom, we shall never understand
life and the world until we see that the zero degree of freedom can
only be the zero of experiencing, and even of reality. Apart from experience
the idea of reality is empty, as some though not all philosophers admit.
Accordingly, Whitehead proposes that we generalize, and take the free
act of experiencing as the universal principle of reality. Not that
human experience is the principle of reality, far from it. Human experience
is only one form; from humans to molecules and atoms, we have a series
of modes of organization; at no point can one say, “Below this
there could be no experience.” If atoms respond to stimuli (and
they do), how else could they show that they sense or feel? If you say
that they have no sense organs, the reply is: neither do one-celled
animals, yet they seem to perceive their environments.
Imagine the universe as a vast system of experiencing individuals on
innumerable levels. Each individual is in some measure free, for experiencing
is a partly free act. Thus creativity, emergent novelty, is universal.
In this way we perhaps understand why the physicists have had to reformulate
the laws of nature as statistical, and not absolute uniformities.
If all individuals act freely, what prevents the world from falling
into hopeless confusion and chaos? How can there be even statistical
regularities? Must not limits be somehow imposed upon freedom in order
to make a world? How are the limits imposed?
There are but two possible answers in a philosophy of universal creative
experience. Either the various forms of experience scattered through
nature miraculously limit or control themselves and each other and thus
preserve a measure of harmony or mutual compatibility; or else some
superior or at least cosmic, form of freedom furnishes a “directive”
which ordinary freedom accepts or obeys. Without guidance, order seems
a mere mystery. In a philosophy of freedom, only a superior form of
creativity, to which all things respond and whose influence is given
a certain priority, can furnish the guidance which orders the world.
This is one way of putting the argument for belief in God. Divine action
is supreme freedom furnishing a general direction to all lesser forms
of freedom, thereby giving the universe an order.
How is this cosmic direction imparted? How does the divine creativity
act on the lesser creativities? How do lesser creativities act on each
other? The answer which the new type of philosophy gives is as follows.
Experience must have stimuli. We do not experience in a vacuum, nor
does one simply experience his own experience of his own experience—experience
of what? There must be objects of experience, data which are already
there, ready to be experienced. If nothing is in the world but creative
experience, what then are the objects which are experienced? Simply,
previous cases of experience? Some of these are one’s own earlier
experiences as one now remembers them. The rest are of other kinds.
The cells of one’s body are, I believe, constantly furnishing their
little experiences which, pooled together in our more comprehensive
experience, constitute what we call our sensations. The cells respond
to, or experience, our experiences, as is shown by the influence our
thoughts and feelings have upon our bodily changes. The stimuli always
influence the response, but they never wholly determine it. Recall also
that the stimuli are really earlier responses, experiences which had
their own stimuli. Thus, what sets limits to the freedom of a response
is simply previous, partly free responses which have now become stimuli.
When two of us talk, each response of one becomes a stimulus to the
other. Always there is a degree of freedom; and the limit upon the present
act of freedom is the sum of past acts to which it is a reaction. Experience
as emergent synthesis feeds on its own previous products, and on nothing
else whatever. This is the only intelligible escape from a blind dualism
of mind and matter.
What prevents anarchy, if freedom alone limits freedom? Keeping to our
language of stimulus and response, what is needed to order the world
is a higher level of response, which like every form of response becomes
in its turn a stimulus—in this case, the supreme stimulus. Each
individual in the world is in dialogue with its neighbors, influencing
and being influenced by them; but each individual is also and above
all in dialogue, largely unconscious no doubt, with the divine individual.
Is this not the traditional belief in God, in new verbal dress? It is,
and it isn’t. The old view had some disturbing features, which
our language avoids. It was usually said that while God influenced all
things, nothing influenced God. For God there are no stimuli; hence
when divine power influences or stimulates the world, it is in a wholly
extraordinary way. God, in the old theory, does not respond, but merely
creates, “out of nothing.” If we refuse to allow an analogy
between ordinary creative action and the divine “creating”
of the cosmos, we use a word the meaning of which we cannot provide.
Our new philosophical doctrine is that even God’s creativity is
a higher form of emergent synthesis, or response to stimuli. God influences
us supremely because God is supremely open to our influence and responds
infinitely delicately to all things, while we respond delicately only
to changes in our brain cells. God contributes to our lives in superior
fashion in equally superior fashion, of receiving contributions from
us. Like the sensitive parent or ruler, God enjoys observing our feelings
and thoughts and responds to them with a perfection of appreciation
to which no parent or ruler can attain. Because only God can appreciate
us, together with all our neighbors, in our full worth, we unconsciously
respond to this appreciation as we do not to any other, and so the order
of the world is possible despite the assumption that only freedom exists
to limit freedom.
Consider now the advantages of this way of viewing God. Unlike the notion
of divine creation as a purely one way action proceeding from God, our
view does not threaten to deny the freedom or creativity of the creatures.
How many theologians have talked as though God, being supremely free,
produced individuals wholly without freedom? Individuals think they
make decisions, but God, we say, has made all things, hence all decisions,
but if God has literally and completely “made” my decision,
how is it mine? Granted that we are willing to think of ourselves as
absolute puppets whose every move is wholly controlled by deity, how
could such puppets even have the notion of freedom form the theory that
they are puppets controlled by the free decisions of God? Or would God,
for them, be the great puppet—controlled by what? The entire view
seems logically untenable. In our philosophy of universal freedom, no
such divine monopoly upon decision making can be conceived. To create
is to respond to the creative freedom of others; hence to be supremely
creative is to respond supremely to that freedom.
Look at another difference between the usual theistic doctrine and our
view. If God creates by sheer fiat, out of nothing, why does God not
make a world wholly good? I suggest that the very problem is false.
We do not need to worship any such all-determining creator in God. Of
course, a worshipful God must have the supreme cosmic, or perfect, form
of creative power. To say that in God is the perfect or infinite form
of creative response to the freedom of others is to imply that God has
the freedom of others to respond to. Why, then is there evil in the
world? Because the making of the world is not a simple act of deity,
but a fusion of divine and lesser acts, all in their fashion self-determining,
creative or free.
As Lequier said, a century ago, God has created us creators of ourselves.
Does such a view “limit” the power of God? This way of putting
the question prejudices the answer and is to be rejected. To exert power,
in our view, is to respond to the responses of others in such a way
that the new response becomes in its turn a new stimulus. In this philosophy
the word power has no other meaning which could be used to describe
God. So we need not limit God’s power to make room for the freedom
of the creatures or to explain evil; we need only take care that when
we speak of divine or perfect “power,” we have a meaning for
the word.
This meaning will take care of creaturely freedom automatically. If
all creatures must be free, then no divine directive could do more than
set boundaries to the possibilities of discord and disorder in the world.
Absolute order could in no way be guaranteed, not because God is weak,
but because it would not be strength to abolish creaturely freedom and
with it any world upon which the strength could be exercised. The problem
of evil in its classical form is a pseudoproblem, due to the misuse
of words. Millions of people over the earth do not believe in God, they
would tell you, chiefly because of evil. The book of Job hints at my
position.
Believing in God does not necessarily mean accepting traditional religious
views, such as the notions of personal immortality heaven, and hell.
Personal immortality seems rather a rival to belief in God than a logical
consequence of it. It is God who never dies, not humanity. Our sphere
of action is on this planet, or eventually in this solar system and
perhaps galaxy, between birth and death. As Robert Frost said, “Earth’s
the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to
go better.”
Is it an intelligent view that the only value our lives will have after
they are over is in the faint echoes and influences which may linger
in human memory and human life? Can we really live merely for posterity,
from a long-run point of view? I believe not. And if you say that we
live partly for our own sakes, for the sheer joy of living, then I reply,
“yes, indeed, but I am speaking of ‘the long-run,” and
in the long run, we and our joys are, from the naturalistic point of
view, not there at all. If you say, we live merely for the present moment,
I reply, not even the higher animals can do that, and from a rational
point of view, once the future is brought in, is it not arbitrary to
stop at one’s own death, or that of one’s grandchildren?
As each of us lives on, from time to time some of our cells die. But
what of it? We do not hesitate to suppose that the cells are there chiefly
for our benefit, and if some of them die, do we not go on, and is not
their contribution to our experience in some degree preserved in our
memories? After all, the parts are for the sake of the whole. We readily
see and accept this where we are the wholes, but is it not rational
to say the same even where we are the parts and not the whole? Each
of us is at least a part of humanity; but is that the ultimate whole
of which we are parts? Is not humanity itself a fragment in space-time?
Only a cosmic life, it seems, can be the real whole for the sake of
which all exists. We humans are such egoists that we try every trick,
and every evasion to miss the point; yet I cannot but think that if
our species survives long enough, we will at last weary of these evasions
and accept the obvious principle that the inclusive reality must contain
all the values, but then must not the inclusive reality be the proper
object of worship, the real divinity? Some say, God is our highest ideal,
but what about the cosmos? Does a fragment set the goal for the entirety
of things? Our view of God may be our highest ideal, but must not God
propose the ideal, the directive, for the cosmos?
The laws of nature are there to show that the ultimate directive does
not come from human beings. Were we consulted in the setting of these
laws? We guess the divine or cosmic ideal as best we can from observation,
reasoning, and intuition. Traditional religions have treasured some
of the results of past efforts in this direction.
We should neither ignore these treasures nor assume their correctness.
Human fallibility has seen to it that they contain many a confusion,
one-sidedness, or self-serving illusion. All worship has been haunted
by the specter of idolatry. Each generation must wrestle anew with the
mixture. Is it not a pity to worship less-than-God?
“Religion and Creative Experience,” The Unitarian Register
and the Universalist Leader, June, 1962.