1398. If Hartshorne is right

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If Hartshorne is right that "the transcendental is creativity [ = becoming as creative of new actuality = contingent production of additional definiteness = process = spontaneity = determining the antecedently indeterminate but determinable = particularization]," then perhaps I need to transform my treatment of the concept "reality itself (or as such)" into a treatment of the concept of "creativity," or, as I would prefer to say, "concrescence" = the process of many growing together to become one, i.e., concrete. This would mean that, from this one concept, all other transcendental concepts can somehow be derived, for they are all concepts either of instances of it (i.e., concretes) or of aspects of it (i.e., abstracts), God being the unsurpassable instance that unsurpassably instantiates the aspects, the world being comprised of all the surpassable instances that instantiate the aspects only surpassably.

Ontology or general metaphysics would thus have to do with concrescence, while theology and cosmology would have to do respectively with the unsurpassable and the surpassable concretes / abstracts.

So far, so good. But concrete reality is one thing, reality, something else. Likewise, "the ultimate or completely general theory of concrete entities as such (from which all abstract entities in some fashion derive)" is one thing, "a theory of reality itself (or as such)," something else.

Metaphysics in the strict sense is the study of the necessary aspects of reality, and of nothing else. As such, it does only two things: it describes the necessary aspect of the one and only necessary reality, including the requirement that this reality have some nonnecessary aspects or other; and it describes what all nonnecessary or contingent realities have in common (for these common features themselves are necessary) and what distinguishes them ontologically from the one necessary reality, even in its nonnecessary or contingent aspects.

"The inclusive mode of reality is actuality.... Everything except an attribute (or mere abstraction) is an actuality (or class or system of actualities). Being actual is the same as being wholly definite (conforming to the Law of Excluded Middle as to predicates) or as being wholly particular or concrete. What has concreteness [ = actuality] is just any and every concrete [ = actual] thing."

"[T]he basic form of reality is concrete reality," because "abstract entities are not real simply in themselves, apart from all concrete embodiment—if nothing else, embodiment in some concrete process of thinking." "But, then, slightly paradoxically, the most fundamental abstraction is concreteness as such."

"Concrete means determinate. . . . [C]oncreteness is definiteness," and "an instance of concreteness will be something wholly definite," while "an instance of less basic abstractions will not be so."

"[T]he theory of concreteness is not the bare theory of being [sc. qua being], of what an 'entity' is just as an entity. Rather it is primarily the theory of what a concrete entity is, as concrete rather than abstract.... [A] purely general theory of concreteness will include a theory of abstractness, but there will be a real distinction between the two."

"The concrete is the inclusive form of reality, from which the abstract is an abstracted aspect or constituent. . . . [T]he concrete is the definite, for to abstract from details or aspects is, in so far, to conceive the indefinite." 

"[S]trictly speaking there is but one metaphysical, innate or strictly universal and necessary idea or principle, concreteness (containing internally its own contrast to abstractness)." 

"[Metaphysics] is just the attempted explication of what it is to be concrete (hence also of what it is to be abstract, insofar as the abstract-concrete contrast is inherent in concreteness as such)."

n.d.; 26 July 2002