Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1888

Marginal pencil notation on page 94 of Charles Hartshorne, Reality as Social Process (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953)

No date

Original is missing.

/Hartshorne: “Unfreedom is, then, an unduly narrow range of alternatives for decision as left open by others.” (Emphasis by Heath, with marginal note: “Not prevented by force — non-political.”) “Now some conclude from this that there is no unfreedom in being determined by one’s antecedent character or experience, since it is still the self, though the antecedent self, which thus determines. One is not enslaved to another person. For legal purposes, perhaps this suffices. But it involves two oversights.”/

    Regardless of all its antecedents, the individual alone chooses among the alternatives “left open by others.” Page 94. How wide these alternatives depends on how they are (or have been) chosen.