By Schubert Ogden
To talk of creativity producing things, or of things as products of creativity, is misleading and fallacious, being, in fact, a palmary instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. What produces things, or what things are the products of, are, simply, things- – both things themselves and other things, both nondivine things and divine things (any two of which are and must be genidentical "states" of but one divine thing). Wiki Markup
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So, instead of speaking of _creativity_ as "indispensable referent of all meaning," or saying, as Hartshorne also does, that "the indispensable minimum of what thought is about is creative becoming as always transcending complete causal determinacy with respect to the next moment and transcending even partial determinacy taking the whole past and future into account" ("Foreword" to _The Ontological Argument of Charles Hartshorne_: xiv), one would better say that this minimum is _God-as-such as including world-as-such_, as each, in their different ways, both self-creative and creative of others. Hartshorne himself may be taken to mean something like \~histhis when he says that "\[d\]ivine creativity, or creaturely creativity, partly in act, partly in potency, is all that reality, actual or possible, can be." |
5 February 1998