969. Clearly, if that which is "eternally real" . . .

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Clearly, if that which is "eternally real" will influence all future prehensions by actualities (PCH: 715), then it cannot be true that "the creative process feeds on its own already achieved products and on nothing else" (PCH: 629; italics added). The creative process evidently feeds—and must feed—also on what never was nor could have been an "already achieved product" of the creative process, since it is some necessary aspect or other of this very process—one of the "defining characteristics" without which there neither would nor could be such a process. As such, it is "eternally real," in no way a temporally produced product of the process.

Elsewhere, Hartshorne is more careful. ""[W]hat becomes can include what does not. . . . [T]he 'emergent whole' can be produced out of elements not all of which have likewise emerged or been produced." "Creative synthesis is the only form of reality which is entirely self-explanatory. It feeds on its own products and qualities; and as for the wholly uncreated, mere or 'pure' being, this is definable as the one fixed datum or element of all synthesizing. It is thus the universal common denominator of process as such, which of course never becomes. Yet it is only a universal aspect of what has or does or may become, isolated by abstraction or comparison" ("Absolute Objects and Relative Subjects: A Reply to D.H. Parker": 178). "If . . . the inclusive category must indicate something protean or ever-new, it does not follow that each and every included item is new. To say, the 'all' is novel each moment, is not to say that 'everything' is novel. . . . [B]ecoming can and does include things which do not become. An actual becoming is always composed of what, at least in that act of becoming, does not become; either because it has previously achieved its becoming, or because it is something wholly abstract, like the generic nature of becoming as such. The latter, of course, does not become" ("Process as Inclusive Category": 96). "[W]hat becomes can very well be a synthesis whose data do not (at least in this case of becoming) become, and they need not all ever have become. For an act of synthesis does not create its own data; moreover, 'synthesis as such' cannot be created, for in this case there would be no data to synthesize. By treating creation as synthesis, we guarantee that there shall be some factor, say synthesis as such, which does not and cannot become, or be created. . . . Becoming itself is necessary and eternal simply because it has nothing more general or ultimate above it" ("The Philosophy of Creative Synthesis": 947).

18 April 1997