904. Hartshorne talks of "God's own abstractive process" ...

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Hartshorne 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.

26 February 2006