742. It has become ever clearer ...

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It has become ever clearer to me that (and why) the philosophical issue between classical and revisionary metaphysics is, above all, the issue between "subject-predicate logic" and the "logic of relatives." If for the first, a subject is what it is through mere private predicates or properties, for the second, a subject is what it is through the references which it is its nature to make to certain other subjects (cf. Hartshorne, "Religion in Process Philosophy": 247). Thus the second holds, in Hartshorne's words, that "[w]e must divide predicates into those which seem complete in themselves and those requiring one or more particular entities beside the one being described. The essential predicates are relative ones and imply dependence or relativity. There are relations because there are relative or dependent things. An elementary proposition of the most important kind refers to more than one subject, if that means concrete entity; it is the predicate that is single" (ClAP: 82).

This means, among other things, that were I now to interpret critically Bultmann's repeated attempts to clarify the fundamental differences between the classical, "humanistic" world view, on the one hand, and the biblical, or New Testament world view, on the other, it would be in terms of this underlying issue. Likewise, it would be in the same terms that I would attempt to interpret the "important shifts both in the history of recent theology and in the history of modern philosophy -- shifts that stand in a peculiar parallelism," that Bultmann personally lived through and judged to be decisive for his own theological work (EF: 287).

My point, then, would be that "the discovery of the historicity of human existence," which Bultmann takes to involve a decisive break with "the idealistic tradition and its guiding metaphysics of the spirit," is entirely of a piece with the discovery of the "logic of relatives" and of the ontology to which it pointed, especially as developed by a neoclassical transcendental metaphysics that is at once broad and austere (GV, 3: 194).

Of course, it remains to dot all the i's and to cross all the t's to make such an interpretation as persuasive to others as it has become to me.

22 March 2006