William Henry Chamberlin: Philosophy

Posted on March 23, 2008
Filed Under Philosophy |

I mentioned in my previous post a little bit about Chamberlin and his influences. Sadly, I’ve been unable to find any of his works available online. If I get time over the next few months I’ll see if I can find some photocopies from the BYU Special Collections. If I manage to find things I might put them up here.

In the meantime here’s a brief summary of his thought from McLachlan’s article.

McLachlan sees Chamberlin’s philosophy as working off of his mentor’s Howison’s. Howison developed a pluralistic idealism where “God is related to an eternal community of persons that is based on the primacy of ethical reason.” (52) All existence is either exiting minds or the experience of minds. All material entities are types of these experiences. Time and space arise out of the correlation and co-existence of minds. (I can’t tell, but this appears to be a throwback to Leibniz’ relativism that many physicists including Einstein sought after) Minds recognize each other as alike and self-determining. Their co-existence thus entails a moral order. Each mind seeks to fulfill a single rational ideal. (Up to this point he sounds vaguely Levinasian, but here I think we start to part company) God is this fulfilled type of every mind. (This is actually somewhat like some pragmatic views of God - especially Peirce) God is the telos or final causation of all minds. Minds have no origin except the logical one relative to each other. They are thus eternal.

Howison talks about these minds being correlated, although it’s not clear from McLachlan’s presentation exactly what this means. All other existence has its ground in these minds. The movement of these changeable things (presumably minds and the things thought) is evolution. (This is very much the role of evolution in Peirce and the pragmatists as well) Creation is an ongoing process rather than an event. The telos is not just a guiding principle but also the ground of all other causes. As we relate to other minds we are relating to God. To exist is thus to recognize other minds.

Now I’d want to actually read up on Howison before saying much. There’s a lot here that obviously has ties to Peirce. (Unsurprising given the relationship to Royce who was very influenced by Peirce) Some really sounds like Levinas and The Other. There are some big metaphysical problems over how to conceive of this God or telos as ground. That is do we take it in more Hegelian terms or more Levinasian terms?

Clearly Howison is working against a Hegelian conception given his opposition to Royce’s conception of God as knower. What he seems to be after is an unity in the community of minds. Now for Peirce the final telos appears to be an endlessly deferred one that is not necessarily present. That is we don’t have some present form determining reality rather reality is working out some perfect representation of reality. Yet it is fundamentally absent. (This is also why Derrida isn’t a Hegelian)

What Howison (and then Chamberlin) do is posit the community as having an unity be the community. This unity of the community arises via love. Does this work though? I’m not sure it does, for certain reasons I’ll not go into. It seems to me though there are some serious temporal questions that one would have to unpack. (This is my criticism of process theology as well - but, as I’ve often disclaimed, I’m never quite sure where process thought comes down on the metaphysics of time)

I should note that in Peirce there is a similar move. I’ve not discussed it much, although it is key to Peirce’s thought. Peirce terms this agapasm which is something beyond determinism and chance but which allows evolution to develop towards a telos. It’s sometimes described as something closer to Lamarkian evolution or evolution based upon information from parent to child. (The recent discussion of memes is tied to this - although I think Peirce’s discussion is much more sophisticated than Dennett’s)

Like Peirce and Dewey, Chamberlin attempts to bridge the traditional subject - object dichotomy that was so characteristic of philosophy of the day. One can read pragmatism in terms of the debate between idealism and realism. (David Hildebrand’s excellent Beyond Realism and Anti-Realism does this with Dewey, for instance) The idea is that idealisms of various sorts privilege the knowing subject and make everything grounded on that. Realism, by contrast, privileges the known object and tends to ground everything on that instead. Pragmatism, especially in Peirce and Dewey, tries to find a third way between these two poles. While one can debate how well they succeed, it definitely is an interesting approach. (One that the latter neo-pragmatists like Rorty or Putnam abandon)

Much of Chamberlin’s views sound like an attempt to think through Leibniz’ monadology only with monads being windowed. Given that this is what Whitehead states he does, it’s unsurprising that there are deep affinities. The danger, although McLachlan doesn’t address it, is that there is always the risk of sollipsm. That is the idea that if you can convince enough people to think differently that at a metaphysical level reality changes. Obviously there is good reason to think this unlikely.

Was Chamberlin influenced by Orson Pratt’s own unique reformation of the monadology? (I should note that there’s no direct evidence Pratt was consciously doing this: however he does end up with a system pretty similar only with atoms with finite extension rather than infinitely small monads.) I don’t know if this was an influence on Chamberlin and how he takes Howison’s ideas. I wouldn’t be at all surprised given the place of Pratt in LDS thought.

Chamberlin makes us of the extensive LDS discussion of freedom and agency. He sees evil as a kind of rejection of the freedom of other minds. As I mentioned, one can’t help but think here of Levinas. The Good thus becomes a kind of respect for others where I not only respect them (seek to avoid violence in Levinasian terms) but also seek to develop a harmony. God is God because he persuades and his greatest tool is to be an example. Our best experience of God is through other people because in this highly relational view of monads, everything is in everything else. We see God as we see respect for freedom.

I’d like to read more of Chamberlin as I find his conception of God obviously very LDS but also as perhaps holding some obvious problems. (That is, can we escape violence? What is the relationship of Chamberlin’s LDS view of God with Howison or Peirce’s views of God which seem much less compatible with LDS thought.)

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