964. To talk of creativity producing things . .

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To talk of creativity producing things, or of things as products of creativity, is misleading and fallacious, being, in fact, a palmary instance of the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. What produces things, or what things are the products of, are, simply, things—both things themselves and other things, both nondivine things and divine things (any two of which are and must be genidentical "states" of but one divine thing).

So, instead of speaking of creativity as "indispensable referent of all meaning," or saying, as Hartshorne also does, that "the indispensable minimum of what thought is about is creative becoming as always transcending complete causal determinacy with respect to the next moment and transcending even partial determinacy taking the whole past and future into account" ("Foreword" to The Ontological Argument of Charles Hartshorne: xiv), one would better say that this minimum is God-as-such as including world-as-such, as each, in their different ways, both self-creative and creative of others. Hartshorne himself may be taken to mean something like this when he says that "[d]ivine creativity, or creaturely creativity, partly in act, partly in potency, is all that reality, actual or possible, can be."

5 February 1998