Charles Hartshorne Definition

Charles Hartshorne, influential in the twentieth century as a philosopher of metaphysics and ground breaking on theology not only on God’s existence as creator of the universe but also the rationality of theism, believed that history provided essential though not adequate conditions for personal identity in the present that almost always leads to an uncertain future. He believed personal identity developed through irregular and disproportionate events in time externally related to those that ensue and internally related to former events, and therefore are positioned at once as partially deterministic and partially nondeterministic. Hartshorne believed there was no sense of evil in the omnipotent. He believed in the actuality of God not specifically
the belief in the existence but further than that he thought, ‘how God exist.’ He also believed that on the vertical dimension is the contrast between extremes on the range of mechanism and chaos, is beauty or good. Extremities like starvation and overeating are incongruent, ugly and disturbing. Instead of imparting truth, extremes such as determinism and materialism contrast may both be false.
Excluding the extremities creates rational. On the horizontal dimension is harmony and discord, profound and superficial. Beauty is the norm otherwise there is order and disorder, profound and superficial, harmonies and discords. On mechanism and chaos, neither will evolve with beauty. He believed that all the aesthetic terms share values of enjoyment and that all are good experiences and what gives intrinsic value is a problem for the aesthetics not the morality. Beauty is in the center and outside the circle there is no value, inside the circle value is abundant. If every human experience were ideal then it would become monotonous and loose interest or value. Monism denies plurality in favor of unity and renders the plurality unintelligible and divides the world (Hartshorne p.7). Between matter and mind dualism, the properties of feeling, designing, deciding, and physical location, shape, and movement must remain in our experience otherwise only idealism will survive. Moderation or contrast is what makes the experience positive. The material verses the ideal thought, according to Hartshorne, the actual value always has the potential for
improvement. There is no limit with infinity. The third median possibility, according to Hartshorne, is the principle of contrast and polarity. God is not impossible; he is the heart or the soul for the whole body of the natural world. Synthesizing the particular with the general, the past with the future, and no future particulars with future determine particulars and you have the supreme synthesis of the contrast, God. God produces the circumstances that give the ideal equilibrium of stability and autonomy.
Lars Spuybroek expands on the idea that picturesque lies between the beautiful and the sublime. Objects are not actually known to be facts, they are the result of values and are therefore qualified and experienced as values, hence items emerge into an aesthetic value as they are experienced by values. Our human nature enable us to experience things that people have already stumbled upon, thus allowing us to believe in a continuity of experiences.
What distinguishes Hartshorne’s diagram from the Max Dessoir diagram, which placed beauty at the top of the circle and on the polar opposite he placed ugly, is beauty, relocated to the center within its own circle, and this change, Hartshorne credited to his student, Kay Davis Leclerc. The Dessoir-Davis Circle (from: Charles Hartshorne, Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method, 1970) was Max Dessoir’s original work and resembled that of a color wheel meaning that the aesthetic feelings actually acquired different appropriate hues. Hartshorne agreed with Dessoir’s diagram with reference to sublime, tragic, ugly, and comic and their internal relationships, however, according to Spuybroek, the aim of beauty is the force of exquisiteness itself. All the conditions on the diagram other than beauty are now evenly located around the circle. On the diagram, magnificent has been replaced by superb and ridiculous has become comic. Hartshorne held that all experiences were aesthetic and experience is actually the purity of all things. Spuybroek believed the space where production took place on the continuum was not addressed on the diagram and he referred to that as Grace. Grace happens when process and product are inseparable and the force or movement that constructs the product is therefore, graceful, and thus, this movement determines structure and thus truly produce picturesque.
Hartshorne improved the Dessoir-Davis Diagram by appropriately changing the title and wording, an obvious and natural improvement, as noted by Spuybroek (Spuybroek, p.
36). In his essay, The ages of beauty: revisiting Hartshorne’s diagram of aesthetic values, Lars Spuybroek explores Charles Hartshorne’s diagram of aesthetic values for classification of every single thing no matter the size, shape, condition of it, or it’s age. Spuybroek describes Hartshorne’s diagram as one that creates a continuum of an aesthetic realm containing distinctive disciplines based on structural-oriented things located at the top of the circle and event-oriented things or “events that contain structure” (Spuybroek, p. 36) found at the bottom of the circle. In this essay, the author tries to “show that we can use Hartshorne’s aesthetic diagram to start to rethink one-dimensional realm, and even to think about how we might add a third dimension”(Spuybroek, p. 36). What of the middle ground between beauty and sublime? Almost immediately my mind scrolled though it’s horror section in search for what I thought of that was sublime, and yet, beautiful and knowingly horrible? The entire process of charting values, because that is what beauty is: accurately applying value based on the sensory level of sublime or picturesque, produces a more precise means to the
end.
Prices’ statement about the picturesque lying in the Middle Between Beauty and Sublime holds true even with the adoption of Hawthorne’s aesthetic values and Spuybroek’s third dimension. With these implementations from Spuybroek and Hartshorne to Price’s one-dimensional theory we have a clearer understanding of the notions.