The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Any ordinary (= ontic) abstract necessarily implies, and thus is really, internally related to, all other still more abstract abstracts of which it is a specialization, including extraordinary (= ontological) abstracts (otherwise known as transcendentals). Thus an individuality necessarily implies, and so is really, internally related to, some species, which in turn necessarily implies, and so is really, internally related to some genus, and so on—all the way up to and including transcendentals. 

Because this is so, however, it would be at best misleading to say that abstractness is the transcendental property of being relative solely to some concretes or other, which are required by a more or less generic or indefinite necessity. This is misleading because it may be taken to mean that abstracts are relative only to concretes and therefore are not also relative to such abstracts, if any, as they in turn necessarily imply. As true as this may be in the case of the extraordinary (= ontological) abstracts that I call "transcendentals," all ordinary (= ontic) abstracts also necessarily imply, and therefore are really, internally related to, the still more abstract abstracts of which they are specializations. 

What is valid in the misleading formulation is that abstractness is the transcendental property of being really, internally related, and so relative, to concretes in only one of the two ways in which it is possible to be so, in that an abstract requires concretes by only a more or less generic or indefinite necessity. Concreteness, by contrast, is the transcendental property of being relative to concretes in both ways, in that a concrete requires the concretes in its past by an utterly specific or definite necessity, while it requires the concretes in its future by only a more or less generic or infinite necessity. 

10 October 1996; rev. 22 July 2002

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