By Schubert Ogden
Hartshorne says that "[v]alue is in definiteness, and definiteness is 'the soul of actuality,'" or that "[t]he actual in its unity has quality or value, and this is no 'predicate' or bundle of predicates to which reference can, in a particular case, be made, save by pointing to the concrete and speaking of 'its' value" (Anselm's Discovery: 189, 227).
What Hartshorne means by this, I take it, is not, as one might infer, that possibilities, as distinct from actualities, have no value at all because they are relatively indeterminate, or determinable, but rather that – to put it in my terms – whereas the value of possibilities as such is constitutive, the value proper to objects, properties, or abstracts, the value of actualities as such is intrinsic, the value proper to subjects, instances, or concretes.
11 October 2004