By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
What is to be understood by "the undifferentiated potentiality for things"?
At first glance, it might appear to be simply a way of referring to what is otherwise called "the necessary," understood as "the common element of all possibility." But perhaps this answer is too simple.
Perhaps just as "all possibility" is one thing, "the common element" thereof, something else, so the same is true of "the undifferentiated potentiality of all things" and "the necessary." The necessary is not identical with the undifferentiated potentiality, in the sense of the eternal continuum of qualitative possibilities (or Peirce's "multitude beyond all multitude"); rather, the necessary is identical with what is common to the undifferentiated potentiality—what cannot itself be differentiated, because it is the universally common element of all possibilities and actualities.
23 October 1998
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