The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne distinguishes between "the pure concept of actuality and potentiality," on the one hand, and "your actuality [and] potentiality, or mine," on the other ("Tillich's Doctrine of God": 188; cf. also 185, where he contrasts "animal knowing" with "knowing in principle," the latter being evidently only verbally different from "the pure concept of knowing," just as the former differs only verbally from "your knowing, or mine."). What is meant, he argues, by "the pure concept of actuality and potentiality" is simply "the determinate in contrast to the determinable," "the determinate" being equivalent to "determinate actuality," "the determinable," to "indeterminate power to actualize."

But what is this if not to say that the pure concept of actuality and potentiality means simply the concrete (= concreteness) and the abstract (= abstractness), keeping in mind that, as Hartshorne rightly insists, "what is in no aspect either [sc. concrete or abstract] is . . . sheer nonentity" (187)?

Interestingly, he adds that what yields determinateness is (1) "definiteness of constituents"; and (2) "definiteness of the manner of synthesis of them" (188). But what difference, other than verbal, is there between "definiteness" and "determinateness"? Surely, it would make better sense to say that a concrete is a determinate, and that this is so in two respects: with respect to its constituents, at least some of which must also be concrete and therefore determinate; and with respect to its own mode of creatively synthesizing its constituents.

March 1998

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