The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Concrescence is the process of determining the antecedently indeterminate but determinable.

"Mere possibility is the possibility of everything but the actuality of nothing. If actuality is not more than possibility, then why actualize? In short, why live? . . .The meaning of life is that each of us can enrich reality with new definiteness, hence new beauties—even for God."

"There are no perfectly definite 'forms of definiteness.' There are unique concrete instances, everyone of which adds something qualitative and valuable to anything merely eternal."

There must be restricted possibilities that are more definite than unrestricted possibilities but less definite than actualities. Whether restricted or unrestricted, however, all possibilities are "real" as well as "logical," in that the concepts of them not only make sense, but also are of things whose production is (was or will be) compatible either with actuality as such, in the case of unrestricted possibilities, or with actuality as of a given time, in the case of restricted possibilities.

September 1995

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