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Wiki MarkupHartshorne talks of "God's own abstractive process" as consisting in God's being "aware of the contrast between what makes \ [God Godself\] in all possible relationships (the indifference point which constitutes \ [God's\] necessary existence) and what {God\] contingently is in \ [God's\] actual relationships" ("Martin Buber's Metaphysics": 63 f.).

What do I make of such talk of God's being "aware"? What I make of it is that it is to be interpreted as a nonliteral -- i.e., symbolic, metaphorical, or analogical -- way of referring to God's being precisely what any concrete, any instance (or sequence of instances) of becoming, necessarily is -- namely somehow "self-relating, all-integrating," God's way of being such being "unsurpassably," because God's integrating of all is "all-in-all-integrating." Only because this is literally or metaphysically so, can what Hartshorne says nonliterally or philosophically also be so.

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