1422. Nothing

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If "nothing" is understood to have any objective reference, it can only be to "pure potentiality." But, then, if what is properly meant by "the strictly necessary" is simply what all potentialities have in common, or their least common denominator, the strictly necessary can only be what all "nothing" has in common, or its least common denominator.

And so the strictly necessary could be said to be the nothing-most aspect of all nothing, objectively understood, or, as Hartshorne puts it, "that to know which is to know next to nothing": "the purely general outline of existence, totally without concrete filling"; "the outline for which all that is concretely real provides unimaginable richness of definite actuality"

29 January 2008