1397. Concerning concrete reality

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If concrete reality is essentially creative process with two aspects—an aspect of pastness or full determinateness and an aspect of futurity or partial determinability—then objective necessity is simply what creative process in either aspect has always been and will always be. It is what all that is fully determinate and all that is partially determinable have in common, their neutral element, or least common denominator, that which was, is, and will be "no matter what" course the creative process may take. This neutral element is creativity, or, as I prefer to say, concrescence, in its essential, irreducible, or invariant features, which are inseparable from the necessary aspect of God as well as from the strictly necessary aspects of anything and everything else.

If the most basic or inclusive type of reality is concrete reality, the most basic abstraction is concreteness—as well as, of course, concrescence, understood as the creative process whereby concrete reality comes to be, thereby instantiating concreteness and, in a different way, abstractness—i.e., concrescence is the creative process of the many's becoming one and being increased by one.

Concreteness is determinateness, definiteness.

All concrete things (in any really conceivable kind of world) must react to their environments—if not as singular wholes, then as aggregates, by reacting to their environments in their constituent parts.

17 October 2004; rev. 4 April 2009