The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

scanned pdf

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

  • No labels