1395. Creativity or Concrescence

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Whitehead's main term for "the ultimate" is "creativity," whereas Hartshorne typically speaks of "creative synthesis." I, for my part, incline to use Whitehead's other term, "concrescence," in the sense, simply, of the process of "growing together" whereby "the many become one and are increased by one," or the concrete becomes the concrete.

I should wish to say, accordingly, that God and concrescence are distinct in that concrescence is—to use Hartshorne's terms—"the ultimate analogical universal or form of forms," or "the transcendental," which applies to everything concretely real, analogically though not univocally, whereas God is the eminent or unsurpassable form of concrescence, everything else concretely real being an instance of its noneminent or surpassable form. In a sense, however, this distinction between God and concrescence is not final, because all concrescence is either God's own self-creation or a datum therefor—either, in Whitehead's terms, a divine "subjective form" or a divine "objective form," either a contribution divinely made to the creatures or a contribution divinely received from them. Thus God is, in a way, "concrescence itself," "concrescence" being understood as "the determining of the antecedently indeterminate [but determinable]," "free growth in definiteness," "contingent production of additional definiteness"—all phrases used by Hartshorne to elucidate "creativity" (cf. "Whitehead's Differences from Buddhism": 409; IO: 241, 201).

Question: Would "concrescent-concrete" perhaps be an apt designation for what Whitehead means by "subject-superject"?—"Concrescent" so used would, of course, be nominative, not participial/adjectival, in meaning.

2 August 2008