The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne seems to reason here (LP: 100 f.) that, by setting up "an analogy between our finitely flexible mode of consciousness and an infinitely flexible mode all of whose instances must have genetic identity with one another," we follow "the more fully conscious way" of understanding what we all mean by "the bare word 'reality,' plus the requirement of 'infinite flexibility.'"  Whereas the bare word plus the requirement "does not suffice to clarify the relation of the concept to experience"—the rule being that "any concept, to have meaning, must somehow be related to experience"—setting up the analogy is sufficient to clarify this relation, and, in this sense, provides a more fully conscious way of conceiving what we all mean.

But here, as, often enough, elsewhere, Hartshorne seems to forget his own clear teaching that analogy, either in the usual or in his quasi-technical sense, simply "interprets" what can and must be intelligible in "purely formal" concepts, lest analogy itself not have any clear and consistent meaning. Nor does he seem to remember that such purely formal concepts are and must be meaningful in their own right—and for the very reason he insists on, that they are "somehow" related to experience. They are thus related, namely, as the most completely abstract concepts necessarily implied by any and all experiences as well as by anything and everything experienced or experienceable.

Moreover, Hartshorne himself goes on to admit that to talk "in terms of God, instead of reality, does not change the formal pattern" (sic!). But, then, if metaphysics is what he himself repeatedly says it is—precisely a matter of analyzing and explicating the most abstract, purely "formal pattern" of experience and reality as such—the gain achieved by setting up the analogy in question is not really a gain in "the more fully conscious way of conceiving" things proper to metaphysics, but—as he himself also in effect admits—is the religious, theological, or philosophical gain of making it "sensible to say that we love the inclusive reality and that it loves us."

18 June 2005

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