Mahanambrata Brahmachari, Charles Hartshorne & Buchanan

Extract from “Transcript of Robert Lax’s Tape on Dr. Brahmachari – 1938”Dr. Mahanambrato Brahmchari-My Impressions, Pages 33-35]
IV. CHARLES HARTSHORNE’S RECOLLECTIONS OF DR. BRAHMACHARI
Charles Hartshorne (born 1897) is one of America’s most distinguished philosophers, perhaps the most influential of the “process” philosophers and theologians, who base their thought on that of Alfred North Whitehead, seeing God as a participant in cosmic evolution. The Divine Realtivity is his best known book. He earned a doctorate at Harvard under Whitehead and taught at the University of Chicago(1928-55). In 1953 he and William L. Reese published a book entitled Philosophers Speak of God (University of Chicago Press, currently available as Midway Reprint). The book presents selections from over fifty thinkers, illustrating some fourteen conceptions of deity, conceptions which the authors compare and evaluate. The Prologue is entitled “Deity as Inclusive Process and Tragic Love” and includes short statements by Mahanambrata Brahmachari, A.N. Whitehead, Nicholas Berdyaev, Soren Kierkegard and G.T. Fechnet.
Queried as to whether he recalled his student Brahmachari at the University of Chicago, he replied in a letter which is reprinted with his permission.
From Charles Hartshorne – 14 September, 1993
Dr Dr. Buchanan,
Of course I am pleased to read your letter about one of my favourite former pupils Dr. M. Brahmachari and to learn he is still alive. I certainly do remember him vividly. I helped a little to finance his stay in Chicago, using part of a bonus that came to me from the PA legislature because of my service in the army medical corps in WWI. Later a wealthy man in N. Chicago helped him by taking him into his home. Yes, my first and chief acquaintance with this Bengali Neo-Vaishnavite School, as some call this group, was through this admirable representative. He had good understanding, I thought, of our tradition. Eventually I met another monk who visited Harvard and had a talk with him. No other form of Hinduism compares with this one in its closeness to my views. “God is more than the absolute” made excellent sense to me, for only the extremely abstract can be wholly non-relative; absolutism and theism are mutually contradictory. Plato in his maturity knew that, though many philosophers today seem still not to know Plato in his final position.
I was pleased that Brahmachari told you I helped him most. I think Morris helped getting him accepted by some of the others in the department. Morris was a fair-minded person, he and I were always friends.
When Brahmachari first talked to me he said, “We believe in Love”. I asked him what do you mean by love? He replied, Love is consciousness of consciousness, experience of experience, and …I am not sure if he said, feeling of feeling. If he said the latter then he had one of Whitehead’s main conceptions, prehension.
After Brahmachari’s Chicago visit another monk of the group went to Harvard, I somehow met him and found his thinking similarly congenial. I forget his name. The only other Hindu I found myself close to in philosophy of religion was a sociologist named Mukherji, who came to Chicago and preached in the chapel. It was soon after I had decided that, although God must be thought perfect and immutable in goodness or ethical value, in aesthetic value no absolute maximum is logically possible. In this I agreed with Whitehead. Mukherji made the same distinction between the two kinds of excellence. I do not recall further details of the sermon, or my talk with him, except that he offered some advice about methods of meditation to favor mystical experience, but my own view has been that whereas the criteria of ethical goodness are somewhat abstract, aesthetic value is the most concrete kind for it is the value experiences as such. Deway sees this point somewhat well and I have seen it all my adult life. Wordsworth saw it superbly and Whitehead was influenced by him, also Shelley(as was I). Whitehead told me this was why he was not a materialist or mind-matter dualist. Independently we were alike in this, except that I was even more like Wordsworth in that I wrote a good deal of poetry such that when I showed a sophisticated friend such a poem he said, “you little wordsworth!”. I sometimes had, when looking at Nature, the kind of mystical sense of unity with it all that W. did; also like him experienced a partial loss of this sense later, but finally returned a permanent belief in the impossibility of experiences, or data of experiences, with zero intrinsic value. As I later found Croce saying, the difference between experience and aesthetic experience is intensive a matter of degree: all experience has given data, with intrinsic value on both sides. Mindless matter is a negative myth, a logical construct, not a possible given reality. My first book defended this, partly on empirical and experimental grounds which some psychologists agreed with then and do now. All experience is of (others’) experience, all feeling of other’s feeling.
The most obvious example is that when cells in our bodies are damaged we are likely to feel pains that are not just ours but are also those of certain cells. A headache is in one place in phenomenal space, a pain in a toe is in a very different place. I challenge anyone to prove there is no pain in any of our cells when we feel physical pains. The case of the amputated leg is no refutation. The cells at the severance place may be involved, and so may cells in the brain. The most direct and simple explanation of our pains in such cases is that cells suffer and the mind-body relation is, as Whitehead says, one of sympathy.
Sorry, I’m wandering from the subject you wrote about too much perhaps.
Good luck to U. Charles Hartshorne, Emeritus Prof. at UT.
I recall how B. said, one should eat only food that is prepared with love. I wandered a little about the United Fruit Company and the bananas he liked to eat. He also wore no leather shoes because they would mean animals killed for their hides. I wonder if you know about P.v of Philosophers Speak of God, by me and William L. Reese, The U. of Chic. Press, 1953, First Phoenix Edition, 1963. A long quotation from B’s dissertation(Swift Hall Library, U. of Chic., 1937)




Page v of “Philosophers Speak of God” mentioned above is reproduced below.
Prologue: Deity as Inclusive Process & Tragic Love
I. MAHANAMBRATA BRAHMACHARI
For Sankara there is only one truth, and that is the Absolute…. It is neither creator, nor preserver, nor savior, nor providence. For all these expressions presuppose relation, and the Absolute is beyond relations. The realm of relation is the realm of phenomenon for Sankara, and hence theology belongs to the phenomenal world……..When the Absolute limits itself, it becomes God.
Different however, is the view of Ramanuja and very different is that of Sri Jiva. For Ramanuja, the Absolute itself is a personality….. He is the Providence and the Lord….
Sankara places God below the Absolute and prefers to call him the lower Brahman. Ramanuja makes them identical and puts them on the same throne….Sri Jiva places God above and beyond the Absolute. This perhaps appears illogical. How can there be anything beyond the Absolute?
For Sri Jiva….the Absolute Being is all-existence, all knowledge, and all-joy. Sri Jiva can express it in one word. The Absolute Reality is Love. It is this nature of the Absolute that accounts for its unceasing expressiveness. The nature of perfect love is to overflow. So far as the Absolute is the perfect Being, it is steady, calm, and immutable, but so far as the outburst of Love is concerned, it is a mobile, flexible, and dynamic substance. Due to perfect integrity, the Absolute is a Being, and due to indomitable impetus for expressiveness, it is a Becoming. Since it is a Becoming, it has a “life” and a “history”. …..Because of the exuberance of fullness, the permanent being becomes fluent.
Krisnadas, a contemporary follower of Sri Jiva, writes that God is full and perfect in his Love and has no room to grow, but it is a mystery that he grows without cessation. In this process of never ending augmentation all the values of joyful delight that are realized remain conserved with Him for all time.
[Doctoral thesis, “The Philosophy of Sri Jiva Goswami (Viasnava Vedanta of the Bengal School)” (Swift Hall Library, University of Chicago, 1937).]