1396. On the abstract or necessary

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If "concrescence" is defined as "the universal of universals characterizing ultimate matter of fact," then it does indeed refer to "the transcendental," or, in Heidegger's phrase, "the transcendens pure and simple." This means that, logically considered, it is the one concept that one cannot fail to employ in thinking about anything whatever. (Thus it is like Heidegger's concept "das Sein," assuming the correctness of my analysis and interpretation of how this concept is to be understood.) Ontologically considered, it is "the indispensable minimum of what thought is about" (so Hartshorne, in "Foreword" to Goodwin: xiv).

But thought is never about the abstract or necessary in itself, because the abstract or necessary is real only insofar as it is included in something concrete. Therefore, while it is true that "nothing is strictly eternal save what Whitehead calls creativity," and I call "concrescence," it is more explicit and therefore more accurate to say that "nothing is unconditionally necessary except creativity as such with its two essential aspects of divine and nondivine becoming (God in some possible state and some world or other) (I0: 270, 313;cf. PCH 663: "Only deity simply in its defining traits, and what is nondivine simply as such, can obtain eternally and without change.").

n.d.; rev. 12 December 2001