1339. Hartshone speaks . . .

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Hartshorne speaks in one place, significantly, of "mere being or somethingness" ("God and the Meaning of Life": 166 f.). My question is, Why wouldn't it be entirely appropriate to pursue transcendental metaphysics in straightforwardly Aristotelian terms as precisely the logical analysis of "being qua being," or "somethingness qua somethingness"?

This would be done on the understanding: (1) that "something exists" is an unconditionally necessary statement; (2) that "something" is to be analyzed in terms of two fundamental contrasts between (a) "concrete" and "abstract" and (b) "divine" (= "unsurpassable") and "nondivine" (= "surpassable"); (3) that these two contrasts in no way involve dualism, but only duality, because "concrete" and "divine" are, in their respective contrasts, the inclusive concepts, "abstract" and "nondivine," the included; and (4) that metaphysics, therefore, is properly pursued as the logical analysis of concreteness, divine as well as nondivine, because concreteness is the inclusive form of "mere being or somethingness," abstractness, its included form. 

Of course, the analysis of concreteness would be, in the nature of the case, the analysis of concrescence as the process whereby, as Whitehead puts it, "the many become one, and are increased by one," i.e., grow together into a "concrete" (concretum). In other words, concreteness is to concrescence somewhat as, in Whitehead's terms, "superject" is to "subject," the latter understood, in Hartshorne's phrase, as "self-relating, all-integrating." So a properly transcendental metaphysics pursued as the logical analysis of "being qua being," on the understanding that being in its inclusive form is precisely concreteness, would turn out to be the logical analysis of process – and, in that sense, or for that reason, would be a "process metaphysics" or, as I should prefer to say, a "neoclassical metaphysics." 

Still and all, it would be a metaphysics squarely in the Aristotelian tradition, whose principal differences from its predecessors in that tradition, in addition to its neoclassical rather than classical insights, would be (1) its clear and sharp distinction between the necessary truths sought by metaphysics and the contingent truths sought by the special sciences; and (2) its strictly transcendental, in no way categorial, conceptuality / terminology.

2 March 2006; rev. 16 October 2009