1031. According to Hartshorne, a transcendental . . .

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1. According to Hartshorne, "a transcendental is a concept applicable to every being including God," whereas "a category is a concept applicable to every being except God." But is this really the nerve of the scholastic distinction? Obviously, Hartshorne assumes that categories and transcendentals alike apply only to "concrete actuality." But my understanding is that transcendentals apply to all realities, abstract as well as concrete, either as convertible or as disjunctive transcendentals. Categories, on the other hand, apply only to concretes. In other words, the nerve of the scholastic distinction is the difference between concrete and abstract, not the difference between divine and nondivine.

2. Significantly, as Hartshorne himself points out, Whitehead's definition of being as "a potential for every becoming" construes the transcendental "being" so that it applies to abstracts as well as concretes. "Abstract entities, as well as concrete entities already actualized, are potential data for all future experience" (328 f.). But this means, then, that his original clarification of the meaning of a transcendental, presupposing, as it does, that transcendentals apply only to concretes, is misled and misleading.

3. When Hartshorne says that "many concepts are categorially universal [sic] besides unity, power, goodness, beauty," it appears that the criterion of a transcendental is "categorial universality," in the sense of applying to God as well as every other being. But, then, the distinction between "category" and "transcendental" is seriously blurred—to the point where it's not any longer clear why Hartshorne begins his discussion of categories by making it. Moreover, the virtue of Scotus's distinction between convertible and disjunctive transcendentals is that it takes account of the "many concepts" that are transcendental besides unity, power, goodness, and beauty.

4. Hartshorne evidently refers to what he calls "the category of existence" when he says that "divine genetic identity is the unsurpassable form under this transcendental" (331). Even if one supposes that the antecedent of "this transcendental" is "genetic identity" rather than "existence," still existence is strictly correlative with genetic identity even as actuality is strictly correlative with strict identity. But, then, one and the same thing—"existence as such" (328)—is said to be both a "category" and a "transcendental," again hopelessly blurring the distinction as originally defined.