By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
1. According to Hartshorne, "the true empiricism . . . will not try to invent an absolutely different concept from that of experience, with its aspects of feeling, love, freedom, and so on, in order to explain the nonhuman, but will generalize these aspects so that, though we can only dimly imagine how, they will cover all possible forms of individual existence, not only from particles to man, but even from man to God" (WP: 130 f.).
2. On the contrary, I submit, metaphysics is truly empirical when it forsakes such generalization for analysis. By Hartshorne's own account, metaphysics properly seeks necessary existential truths, concepts and assertions so utterly general or abstract that they are necessarily instantiated. "The general principle in all this is that contingency is always the step from the general or abstract to the special or more nearly concrete. From 'this is something' to 'this is an animal' the movement cannot be deductive. The reverse step is deductive. When one has come to the most general ideas, one has concepts that must always be derivable from no matter what starting point. This is why necessary truths are strictly implied by any truth you please. One is at the hub where all spokes meet" ("John Hick on Logical and Ontological Necessity": 158).
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