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Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne by Daniel Dombrowski Review by: Randall E. Auxier Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 203-207 Published by: Indiana University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40358958 . Accessed: 24/06/2014 21:15 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 195.78.109.66 on Tue, 24 Jun 2014 21:15:41 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorneby Daniel Dombrowski

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Page 1: Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorneby Daniel Dombrowski

Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne by Daniel DombrowskiReview by: Randall E. AuxierTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, Vol. 41, No. 1 (Winter, 2005), pp. 203-207Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40358958 .

Accessed: 24/06/2014 21:15

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Indiana University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Transactionsof the Charles S. Peirce Society.

http://www.jstor.org

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Page 2: Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorneby Daniel Dombrowski

Book Reviews

Divine Beauty: The Aesthetics of Charles Hartshorne Daniel Dombrowski Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004 230 pp. $59.95 (cloth only)

This is Daniel Dombrowski's third book-length treatment of the philosophy of Charles Hartshorne. Dombrowski is indeed a prolific writer of books on a wide range of philosophical topics, having published full studies devoted to vegetarianism, abortion, pacifism, political liberalism, and figures such as Plato, John Rawls, Stephen R.L. Clark, St. John of the Cross, and Nikos Kazantzakis. In 1988 Dombrowski applied Hartshorne's philosophical position to the issue of animal rights (a topic on which Dombrowski has written two other related books), and in 1996 he wrote a comparative analysis of Hartshorne's long- standing debates with "analytic theists," such as Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne. Hartshorne, who passed away in 2000, held both of these previous books in high esteem, which was certainly not the view he took of every book on his ideas. I do not doubt that this new book by Dombrowski would also receive the same marks from Hartshorne. This consideration alone would not be very important except for the fact that Dombrowski actually is setting out in Divine Beauty to do something Hartshorne needed to do but never got around to doing, which is to synthesize all of his work and views on aesthetics into a single text. This co-ordinate presentation of ideas expressed in disparate times and places may be seen as the main contribution of the book, and indeed, this is the first book-length treatment of Hartshorne's aesthetic theory.

Hartshorne's central thoughts and vocabulary changed very little in his long career - his first published writings appeared in the late 1920s, his last book appeared in 1997 - which means, in effect, that one can without much serious interpretive risk, place ideas from Hartshorne's Harvard dissertation (1923) alongside his last writings with a fair expectation of consistency. Dombrowski does this kind of synchronic juxtaposition, and freely. What development there is in Hartshorne's thought in the many years of his career really follows a pattern of providing an ever more detailed articulation and elaboration of the central insights, while the basic viewpoint remains the same. Thus, Dombrowski is saved

Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society Winter, 2005, Vol. XLI, No. 1

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the effort of having to provide a genealogy of Hartshorne's development in this book, allowing him to focus more energy upon the task of presenting the ideas themselves.

However, Dombrowski states an intention to accomplish a second major task in this book, which is to use the synchronic statement of Hartshorne's aesthetic theory as a defense of "neoclassical theism" against classical and traditional theism. Part of the reason I am confident Hartshorne would appreciate the intent of this book is precisely because this is undoubtedly what Hartshorne himself would have done with a book on his aesthetic theory, if he had written one. Admittedly, very few philosophers today would undertake such a project for such a purpose. The philosophical arguments for and against the existence of God, and regarding competing conceptions of God have become an increasingly isolated and specialized topic (whether or not it should be is another matter), but the idea of explicating a total viewpoint on aesthetics as a basis for a particular philosophical theology is not a topic regarding which there is likely to be another book this decade. Nevertheless, Hartshorne's neoclassical theism remains a viable and thoroughly debated interpretation of the concept of God in the philosophy of religion and philosophical theology, and is widely viewed as either apostate, or the only viable option by partisans on the opposite sides. Hence, this book says it seeks to strike a blow in that debate, a sort of rabbit-punch coming from the unexpected direction of aesthetics. With the analytic theists down for the count from a previous match, this book goes after "traditionalist Jews, Christians and Muslim believers" (p. 1). Other tasks the book accomplishes in part are to situate Hartshorne's aesthetic theory in its 20th century context; to show its naturalistic basis; to defend Hartshorne's viewpoint against some critics and close competitors in aesthetics; and to suggest the viability of this aesthetic theory for present and future discussion. Thus, although Dombrowski has been spared a difficult interpretive task one would usually confront in bringing together philosophical material over three-quarters of a century, he strikes out ambitiously to climb a high and remote mountain which is unfamiliar to most contemporary philosophical explorers. Let us see whether he achieves the summit.

The basic outline of Hartshorne's aesthetic theory is the first task. In chapters 1-3, Dombrowski situates the role of aesthetics in Hartshorne's philosophy and outlines the theory. The basic insight is that beauty is a mean among four intersecting poles of relation. On the x axis is the relation of depth, sublimity at one extreme and superficiality at the other, while on the y axis the relations of total unity and utter diversity are the extremes. Beauty is where these crossing concerns come into balance, where "harmony or unity-in- variety" is balanced by "intensity" (p. 28). On the x axis, if an experience is too profound or deep for the experiencer, it will tend toward the sublime and away from the beautiful; if an experience is not deep enough, it tends towards the trivial and also away from beauty. Balanced intensity is a mean of depth and superficiality. Similarly, on the y axis, if an experience is characterized by too much order, it

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becomes merely tidy or neat, or even monotonous, at the extreme, while too much diversity in a single experience renders it chaotic. Beauty exists when an experience is adapted to the capacities and history of the experiencing being in such a way that the experience has both intensity and unity-in-variety in just the right proportion. This insight is the key to Hartshorne's aesthetics.

Once Dombrowski has explained the theoretical framework, he argues in chapter three that aesthetic experience is basic to all experience, because all values presuppose and continue to involve aesthetic values. Hence, the principles revealed in the general description of beauty have application to every subsequent branch of philosophy, and indeed, to every aspect of life. Dombrowski calls this "the aesthetic attitude" and its adoption is a characteristic of most process in philosophy. He recognizes that even though all values have an aesthetic basis, including ethical values, he does not seek to reduce aesthetics to ethics, or all values to aesthetic values. Traditional theists will not be convinced on this point, and would not yield the point no matter how well Dombrowski made the case. The traditional God is not a God whose basic mode of existence presupposes or depends upon feeling in any way, and no classical theist will be willing to accept the consequences that flow from this source. The traditional God is foremost moral being whose "feelings" - if God has any - would be graded first according to their moral worth. The moral or ethical is the existential ground of the aesthetic for classical and traditional theists, not vice versa, and the aesthetic basis of human experience is very much tied to the embodiment of human beings. Traditional theists simply point out that generalizing the "aesthetic attitude" into a theological first principle would imply that God must have a body (as Hartshorne and Dombrowski readily admit). Since the idea that God has a body is inconsistent with traditional theism, except for the Christians who make an exception for God's incarnation in Jesus, a philosophical defense of a form of theism that depends upon this hypothesis gets nowhere with such theists. Dombrowski certainly would have an inroad with traditional Christians if he were to point out that God is embodied in Jesus, and for Jesus feeling the world is involved in knowing it, even morally. An interesting debate with that limited group of traditional theists might occur if Dombrowski took this tack, but he does not. Hence, little progress will be made in moving classical theists closer to the neo-classical view, and one must assume that Dombrowski is really aiming to convince those who are still trying to make up their minds about how to have a philosophically coherent theism that presupposes embodiment for all genuinely existent beings. From this point of view, "the aesthetic attitude" is a convenient and valuable hypothesis, and the real task would be to show how other forms of value are dependent upon and to what extent they are independent of aesthetic values. Dombrowski provides a part of that story in this pivotal chapter, but not enough of it.

The key effort of the next three chapters of the book is to naturalize the aesthetic attitude and Hartshorne's theoretical structure, showing its applicability

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to non-human animals, and generalizing a case study into a set of requirements for any philosophical aesthetics that wishes to be genuinely empirical. The stated goal is to articulate a "non-anthropocentric aesthetic." The incorporation of Hartshorne's empirical and theoretical work in ornithology into his aesthetic theory is not only well done, it accomplishes a task that has long been a desideratum in Hartshorne scholarship and process philosophy generally. Most previous work connecting process philosophy to the natural world by means of natural science has focused on physics, while the interest in biology has been largely ceded to pragmatists (all of whom are process philosophers of a stripe, but of a different temper from Whitehead and Hartshorne). Hartshorne himself certainly preferred to understand the philosophy of organism on a biological model, but the connections to the biological world were not drawn clearly enough to bring process thought into the sphere of thinking of those who write and think about the philosophy of biology. Instead biological philosophers have gone the route of general systems theory, a rather poorly thought-out substitute for process philosophy.

In these chapters Dombrowski has used the process aesthetic philosophy to move from empirical results of studying birdsong through the philosophy of sensation, and into the metaphysical worth of a panexperientialist stance: "that throughout animate nature, even plant life, there is feeling; that so-called inanimate nature is not really inanimate; and that nature as a whole expresses a unified soul-like reality, of which lesser lives are participants" (pp. 98-99). Dombrowski argues vigorously that this set of assumptions is not only every bit as empirical as the key assumptions of materialism, determinism, and atheism, but is rather more so, with each of the other views taking an abstract concept rather than a concrete experience as the starting point of generalization.

Certainly classical theists will be unimpressed, since becoming or remaining credibly naturalistic has never been for them a high priority. Once again we should probably read Dombrowski as aiming to convince naturalistic thinkers with theistic leanings, or perhaps those who have already decided to take their philosophical departure from natural science.

At this point in the progress of the book Dombrowski pauses for a chapter to defend process aesthetics from the charge of relativism and subjectivism. Stated more plainly than Dombrowski ever puts it, the basic point is that claiming all experiences are relationally situated does not imply the equal aesthetic value of the experience of each, nor does it imply that aesthetic experience is wholly private. Rather, the theoretical structure Hartshorne advocates provides a basis for the development of objective criteria regarding the aesthetic value of experiences, with the added advantage that this approach does not cut out the value for the subject of the experience had. Dombrowski approaches this issue by providing an argument- by-example about the objective bases for making judgments regarding color and musical sounds, and by examining the old saw that "beauty is in the eye of the beholder." He generalizes his points from these

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examples, saying finally "we have obviously only scratched the surface of the topic of aesthetic relativism" (p. 124), - with which I heartily agree. The book is not helped by this chapter, in my view, mainly because the topic is simply too complicated to be treated as a pause that refreshes.

The final three chapters, on religious dimensions of aesthetic experience, absolute beauty, and immortality, are those in which we would expect Dombrowski to make good on the claim to employ Hartshorne's aesthetic theory in defense of neo-classical theism. This is not what Dombrowski does, however. Instead he does exegesis on how Hartshorne's aesthetic theory hooks up with his neo-classical theism, and Dombrowski takes aim at less worked out similar views, such as those of Bergson and James and other lesser lights. This is a valuable and well-executed piece of scholarly exegesis, and an important contribution to the on-going dialogue of Hartshorne scholars, but in the end, Dombrowski initially selected a remote and high mountain to climb, and seeing how far he would need to go to climb it, chose to climb a closer and smaller one instead. There is much in these last three chapters for process philosophers, little for pragmatists and other naturalists, and nothing at all for classical theists and traditionalists.

Overall this is a good contribution to the Hartshorne literature, a fast way to get Hartshorne's aesthetic theory without having to dig around in 70 years worth of books and articles, and a provocative restatement of an ever provocative philosophical viewpoint.

Southern Illinois University, Carbondale Randall E. Auxier

[email protected]

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