1207. When Whitehead says, "creativity . . .

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When Whitehead says, "creativity is the ultimate behind all forms, inexplicable by forms, and conditioned by its creatures" (PRc: 20), he's evidently making the same basic point he makes when he speaks of "the defect of the Greek analysis of generation," that it conceives generation "in terms of the bare incoming of novel abstract form," so failing to grasp "the real operation of the antecedent particulars imposing themselves on the novel particular in process of creation" (AI: 242). 

Clearly, "the real operation of the antecedent particulars" is but another way of saying (in the active voice) that creativity is "conditioned by its creatures" (in the passive voice). 

Just as clear to me, at any rate, is that this is simply a more generalized way of formulating the issue to which Bultmann draws attention between a Greek and a biblical way of thinking about things. 

3 December 2005 

Ad 3 December 2005--When Whitehead says (AI: 361) that "this Aristotelian doctrine [sc. of primary substances, according to which "no individual primary substance can enter into the complex of objects observed in any occasion of experience"] is a complete mistake," he's evidently, again, making the same point he makes about "the defect of the Greek analysis of generation" (242). 

 Cf. also 169 f.: "[l]f we ask for a complete account of a real particular thing in the physical world, the adequate answer [from "the point of view derived from Aristotelian Logic"] is expressed in terms of a set of these abstract characteristics, which are united into an individualized togetherness which is the real thing in question.

"This answer is beautifully simple. But it entirely leaves out of account the interconnections between real things. Each substantial thing is thus conceived as complete in itself without any reference to any other substantial thing. Such an account of the ultimate atoms, or of the ultimate monads, or of the ultimate subjects enjoying experience, renders an interconnected world of real individuals unintelligible. The universe is shivered into a multitude of disconnected substantial things, each thing in its own way exemplifying its private bundle of abstract characters which have found a common home in its own substantial individuality. But substantial thing cannot call unto substantial thing. . . . In this way, Aristotle's doctrine of Predication and of Primary Substance have issued into a doctrine of the conjunction of attributes and of the disjunction of primary substances."

19 April 2009