1032. How confused—and confusing . . .

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1.How confused—and confusing—Hartshorne's teaching about analogy is becomes clear from statements he makes about "categories" and "transcendentals" in the different contexts in which he discusses the terms.

2. Thus, according to his statements in "Love and Dual Transcendence": 99 f.: "there is no non-literal meaning for a category. . . . categories are literal, or they are nothing." On the other hand, he evidently distinguishes what he thus refers to as "categories" not only from "pictures" (i.e., words used non-literally as pictorial aids for a meaning of universal relevance), but also from "concepts taken from experience of persons," otherwise referred to as "psychical terms," which he holds to be "analogical" rather than literal."

3. But now in this same context, he introduces the medieval distinction between "categories" and "transcendentals" in order to sum up his own doctrine of "dual transcendence." This doctrine, he says, is that "categories become transcendentals when qualified by 'unsurpassably'." Given the meaning he himself assigns to "categories" and "transcendentals," this formulation doesn't make very much sense, seeing that "transcendentals" do not apply only to deity but also to deity, applying to everything else as well. This no doubt explains why he has to go on to say that categories become transcendentals applying to creatures "if qualified by 'surpassably'"! But this confusion is trivial as compared with another far more serious one, which appears once one takes account of statements he makes elsewhere in a closely parallel context, where he discusses "Categories, Transcendentals, and Creative Experiencing."

4. According to this parallel discussion, "a category is a concept applicable to every being except God. A transcendental is a concept applicable to every being including God" (319). But in this context, Hartshorne goes on to argue that "instead of 'being,' creative experiencing should be taken as the inclusive transcendental. Concrete reality, as we can know it, is experiencing as prehending a determinate past and, with each new total prehensive act, constituting a new determinate actuality which itself will be prehended by subsequent actualities" (322). What is "creative experiencing," however, if not precisely one of the "psychical terms" that Hartshorne himself allows can be used only non-literally, i.e., analogically? But, then, how could it be a transcendental, which, since it is what a category becomes when qualified by "unsurpassably" (or "surpassably"), must also be literal or nothing? The only thing that could be a proper transcendental is not "creative experiencing," but the categories that this concept, like all other "psychical terms," requires to be literally applied if it is "both to respect, and yet span, the gulf between the worshipped and the worshippers."

5. But this, obviously, is the very proposal I myself have put forward in calling for a strictly transcendental metaphysics. "Creative experiencing" is precisely not the inclusive transcendental, but a non-literal, analogical, in fact, pictorial term whose valid use presupposes the applicability of properly literal, transcendental concepts that already have universal relevance.

6. Incidentally, it's worth noting that, despite allowing that words like "perceive" are "analogical, rather than literal," Hartshorne proceeds to treat "knowing or perceiving" as if it were categorial and, when qualified by "surpassably/unsurpassably," transcendental—and this in the very next paragraph!