1450. Logical Types (I)

SCANNED PDF: Part 1

1. “Logical types” (= “logical-type distinctions”) apply, in the first instance, to propositions and, presumably, concepts, only secondly, or indirectly, to what the propositions or concepts themselves apply to (“The Idea of God—Literal or Analogical?”: 4). Thus one could speak of "ontological types” (or "ontological-type distinctions") corresponding to the logical, analogously to the way in which logical modality corresponds to and is derived from ontological (CSPM: 133). Thus, when Hartshorne speaks, e.g., of “the logical-type difference between God and the mere creatures” (CSPM: 145) he is speaking elliptically, if not carelessly. He means the ontological-type difference between God and the mere creatures with which the logical-type difference between propositions about God and propositions about the mere creatures is correlative and from which it is derived.

2. For Hartshorne, to differ "in principle” excludes differing "merely in degree,” but it does not exclude differing "in degree." On the contrary, to differ in principle is to differ in maximum degree, in that degree than which none could be greater. There is, in short, an infinite difference where there is a difference "in principle," but it is still a relative, rather than an absolute difference, although it is not a finite difference. An infinite difference is like a finite difference in being a relative instead of an absolute difference, and therefore a difference of degree. But it is unlike a finite difference in not being merely a difference of degree but also a difference in principle. (An infinite difference is the difference between "all" and "some," whereas a finite difference is a difference between "some [more]" and "some [1ess].” The difference between either “all” or “some”, on the one hand, and “none,” on the other, is, by contrast, an absolute difference.) Hartshorne’s a fortiori argument for psychicalism as being implied by theism (e.g., CSPM: 145) presupposes such distinctions between types of difference. For if one treats the difference between one “mind" or "feeling” and any other as a difference merely in degree, one cannot make sense out of the idea of God as infinite mind or feeling. Conversely, to take "mind" or "feeling” as applying at least analogically to God is to undercut any reason for refusing to apply the concept to any merely finite being whatever. Clearly, the difference between the infinite and the finite is greater than any difference between anyone finite and another.

3. Hartshorne is committed to holding that "the all-inclusiveness of God” can be stated formally, and, therefore, literally—namely, by saying "God is coincident with all truth and reality"—and that "all-inclusiveness, non-duality, is a formal character of deity,” to speak about which as such is to speak literally ("The Idea of God," 5).

4. Granted that, as Hartshorne says, "in metaphysics we are seeking ultimate or a priori generality, beyond all contingent special cases," why should one agree with him that "every concept considered as even possibly metaphysical should be freed of limitations which do not seem inherent in its meaning” (CSPM: 90; my italics)? It is obvious on the face of it that Hartshorne could not even say this unless it were false. For in saying it, he himself employs concepts that do not need to be freed from limitations because, by their very meaning, they .do not have any such—e.g., "ultimate or a priori generality," "contingent special cases." If, as Hartshorne assumes, metaphysics is a matter of "generalization"—"the attempt . .  to generalize all ideas to the fullest possible extent" (LP: 2l9)—it is this only secondarily, being primarily the attempt to explicate the strictly necessary conditions of the possibility of all experience and reality, whether by generalizing our ordinary categories or, rather, by analyzing the transcendental concepts necessarily implied both in using such categories and in generalizing them.

5. Presumably, when Hartshorne speaks of, for instance, “the mere idea of memory" (CSPM: 91), what he means is the idea of memory "freed of limitations which do not seem inherent in its meaning" (CSPM: 90) and thus generalized, to “the fullest possible extent" (LP: 219; cf. RSP: 84, where Hartshorne speaks of “refining and extending” ordinary meanings). But my question is whether there is, or even can be, any such “mere idea of memory” as really, and, therefore, more than verbally, different both from the idea of memory involved when "memory” is employed merely symbolically, or metaphorically, and from the idea of being the subject of relations to terms, at least some of which were themselves subjects of the same kind of relations, which is to say, from the strictly transcendental idea of (concrete) relativity. Clearly, "the mere idea of memory” must at least imply the idea of relativity in this sense. But what I want to know is how it can in any way be different from this idea of relativity even while being also different from the idea of memory when "memory" is frankly used as a metaphor or symbol.

6. Concerning the "logical-type distinctions": Hartshorne says that "reality is distinguishable categorically or a priori into concrete and abstract, and there is at least one further distinction that is also a priori," by which he presumably means that "between God and any other individual being" (because Ch. XII, to which he refers in saying this argues that “the necessarily existent abstraction 'something' divides a priori into two correlative abstractions, [1] divine or unsurpassable something and [2] non-divine or surpassable something" [CSPM: 251])(CSPM: 90). This is to be compared with his statement that "God is being in both its opposite aspects: abstract least common denominator, and concrete de facto maximal achieved totality" (DR: 88; "being” here meaning what Hartshorne elsewhere occasionally speaks of as "existence" [LP: 63 f.], but more typically designates as "reality"). But what, then, of the other distinctions that Hartshorne appears to refer to as "logical-type distinctions"? If Hartshorne clearly assigns a priority to the distinction between concrete and abstract, to which even the distinction between God and any other individual is, in a way, secondary (being "a further distinction"), he can also speak of "the difference between relatively abstract (or concrete) and fully abstract (or concrete)” and in the same context, can insist on sharply distinguishing between "the existence of individuals" and "the actuality of states or events" (CSPM: 74). Thus he can also distinguish as “logical types," "events” from "individuals,” and "individuals" from "abstract qualities,” and, as regards the last, further distinguish between "genera” and "species," on the one hand, and “categories," on the other. As compared with "events," not only "abstract qualities," but even individuals are relatively abstract. On the other hand, as compared with "metaphysical categories," not only events, but even individuals and species are relatively concrete. (Consider his use of the phrase, “concrete species of entity," as distinct from "species of concrete entity” [LP: 134].) Only events are fully concrete, and only metaphysical categories are fully abstract, everything in between being relatively concrete or relatively abstract depending on which of these extreme contrasts is taken as term of comparison. As for the further "logical-type distinction" that Hartshorne also appears to allow for, namely, that between "singular and aggregate” (90; cf. 141), it seems justified by the principle that the unity or integration required in order to be a singular is not a matter of degree but is either present or not present (cf. RSP: 54 f.). Thus, while individuals are both singular and subject to change, events are not subject to change even though singular, and groups are not singular even though subject to change. — Looking back on the above, I think the fundamental contrast between concrete and abstract allows for a certain centrality to be given to the distinctions between (l) events, (2) individuals, and (3) qualities (CSPM: 140, 254), or between actuality, existence, and essence (RSP: 204 ff.). Even as events, or actuality alone, are fully concrete, so qualities, or essence, alone are fully abstract. Individuals, or existence, by contrast, are relatively concrete or relatively abstract, depending on whether one compares them with qualities, or essence, on the one hand, or events, or actuality, on the other (cf., e.g., ANTOT: 35).

7. Given "the 'ontological' or 'Aristotelian' principle," according to which "the necessary or universal is . . . real only in the contingent or concrete" (CSPM: 90, 271), one can say that a quality or character, whether generic or specific, requires some individual(s) and hence event(s) in which it is alone real. In other words, it must be the term of at least some relation the other term of which is the subject of the relation. Likewise, even such fully abstract qualities or characters as are described by metaphysical categories (or transcendentals) require some embodiment, in the sense that they must be the term of some relation the other term of which is not merely a term but the subject of the relation. To this extent, even abstractions, indeed, even metaphysical abstractions, might be said to be relative to events, in that they require at least some events that as concrete, and hence subjects of relations, include them as qualities or characters. But two further points need to be insisted upon. First, there is a difference between "particular and generic necessity," in that, while the subject of a relation necessitates its particular correlative term(s), the mere term of a relation necessitates only that an intensional class of suitable subjects of the relation be non-empty (CSPM: 109, 101 f., 103). Second, there is a difference between the necessarily non-empty intensional classes generically necessitated by metaphysical categories and the contingently non-empty classes generically necessitated by all other abstractions, genera as well as species (DR: 72. In fact, Hartshorne says that "between 'possibly empty' and 'necessarily non-empty' classes there is a logical-type distinction—logical because modal, and a matter of meaning, not contingent fact" [CSPM: 145].) Assuming that "the relativity negated by absoluteness is relativity to the contingent," one can even maintain that metaphysical categories are not really relative after all (DR: 72). For the only intensional classes, to which metaphysical categories are relative by way of a necessity that is "generic or indefinite," rather than "particular and definite" (CSPM: 103), are necessarily, not contingently, non-empty.—If “the ordinary individual is highly selective with respect to the events which can actualize it" (RSP: 206), the same is true, mutatis mutandis of the ordinary (specific or generic) abstraction with respect to the individuals that can actualize it (genera being generically necessarily actualized in species even as species are generically necessarily actualized in individuals).  (In other contexts, Hartshorne can bring out the sense in which an ordinary individual such as a man is like the universal rather than the particular, in that "a man's distinctive personality traits are a sort of highly specific universals of which each momentary state of the man is a new instance or embodiment" [ANTOT: 35].) But metaphysical categories, or, as I should say, transcendentals, are not thus "highly selective," because they generically necessitate only the necessarily non-empty classes of individuals as such, i.e., the class of ordinary, non-divine individuals and the "unique class" (i.e., the one-member-class, which is not a member of any class of similar classes) constituted by the divine individuality (DR: 157). Both of these nonintensional classes are necessarily non-empty, because the only alternative to this ordinary individual existing is some other ordinary individual existing and the only alternative to God existing in this actual state is God existing in some other actual state (cf., e.g., LP: 90 f.: "creative alternativeness"). In other words, contingent existence as such and necessary existence as such alike are utterly positive, non-exclusive, non-competitive, in no way negative, exclusive, competitive. That some creature exists excludes nothing positive, and the same is true if one can say that God exists.

8. If it is true that “to achieve a consistent idea of 'absolute ' we need not attempt the impossible task of abstracting from all relationships" (the very meaning of "absolute" being defined in terms of relativity, from which it follows that it cannot be independent of relativity in every sense even if it can be independent of which relative things there are), it is equally (= correspondingly) true that "admitting free alternatives of creation does not force one to admit ‘not creating anything' as one of the alternatives" (DR: 73 f.). God is absolute, not because there could be nothing other than God, but because everything other than God, unlike God, need not have been at all. Correspondingly (= equally), God is free, not because God might not have created anything at all, but because anything that God either creates or could create need not have been created at all, because God could create or could have created something else instead.

9. “To be is to be a potential for becoming.” This is true of the abstract as well as the concrete, and of God as well as the creatures of God. But while the abstract as much as the concrete is a potential for becoming, only the concrete actually is a becoming—the meaning of “the concrete” being "becoming (as inclusive of being)." Thus to be concrete is not only to be a potential for becoming, but to be the actualization of such a potential, to be a becoming for which whatever is is a potential. The abstract is always the term, never the subject of relations. The concrete is always the subject, even if also the term of relations.

10. Hartshorne reasons: "God is the all-inclusive reality [by his own account, a literal statement, because “all-inclusiveness, non-duality, is a formal character of deity" (“The Idea of God”: 5)]; God’s knowing, accordingly, must likewise be all-inclusive [by Hartshorne’s own account, an analogical statement, because “the psychological conceptions, such as love, will, knowledge, are non-literal,” and “’knows’, is only analogical” (4))" (ANTOT: 12). But how different is this from Mascall 's inference that, although "of self-existing goodness we can frame no concept,” we nevertheless can know by analogy that “in God 'goodness exists self-existingly’”? In other words, isn't Hartshorne's inference that God's knowing is all-inclusive parallel to Mascall 's inference that God's goodness is self-existing—in that the meaning of a term predicated analogically of God is inferred from the meaning of a term predicated literally of God, assuming that the term predicated analogically can also, in fact, somehow be thus predicated? But if this is correct, isn't it apparent that Hartshorne knows no more about God's knowing than Mascall knows about God's goodness—and that neither knows any more than I know, assuming only that talk of God's knowing or goodness is frankly symbolic, or metaphorical, rather than analogical? In short: the issue is not the extent of our knowledge—Hartshorne's and mine—the issue is the validity of our respective claims to knowledge. I am no more agnostic than he is simply because I claim to know less than he claims to know!

11. On the whole business of deriving the concept of God, "at least so far as the meaning of the term is concerned," from worship—so that God can be said to be "the One Who is Worshipped" (ANTOT: 2 f., 89)—my question is whether one could not argue more plausibly still that, in theistic religions, at least, "God is the One who is believed in,” where "belief in" is taken in the twofold sense of trust in, on the one hand, and loyalty to, on the other—the correlative of trust being "center of value,” while the correlative of loyalty is "cause to serve,” both of which imply “all-inclusive individual" (H. R. Niebuhr. Hartshorne speaks of God as "the greater Cause," or "an enduring Cause" in LP: 145). The merit of this alternative is indicated by Hartshorne himself, insofar as he argues that '''faith' in general is trust, and this means, doing our part in the system of things with confidence that the rest of the system will do its part, at least to the extent that we shall not have striven simply in vain” (RSP: 163). It is also indicated by his taking seriously that "it is religiously significant that God be supposed absolute,” because “absoluteness is requisite for complete reliability” (DR: 22); and that “the idea of God” would be deprived of "most of its value" if “there is no way in which he [sc. God] could not change," because "one could place no ultimate reliance upon a deity in every way subject to imperfection and alteration" (RSP: 155). The point, of course, is not that the idea of God cannot be derived from worship, or from the loyalty that is, in effect, what he means by "worship." (He defines "worship" as "love with the whole of one's being" [ANTOT: 12] cf. LP: 40: "To worship x is to 'love' x with all one's heart and all one's mind and all one's soul and all one's strength.") The point is only that worship or loyalty is neither the only nor the primary thing about theistic religion, and that the same idea of God can be equally well derived from the confidence or trust that is presupposed by worship or loyalty. “We love because he first loved us.”

12. Hartshorne argues that, even as any sentient individual in any world “experiences and acts as one,” so its “total environment” must be experienced as "in some profoundly analogous sense, one” (ANTOT: 6). What is the meaning of “analogous" here? Is the denial of any proper metaphysical analogy, as a stratum of meaning distinct from both literal and symbolic strata, such as to entail the denial that "analogy” can be used as Hartshorne uses it here? It is relevant to observe, first of all, that, on Hartshorne's own showing, (1) non-literal, or analogical, concepts are matters of degree, “affairs of more or less, of high and low” ('The Idea of God": 4); and (2) individual unity, of experiencing and acting, is not a matter of degree, but is all or none (RSP: 54 f.). It would seem to follow, therefore, that "one" as applied to any sentient individual and as applied to “the sole nonfragmentary individual" either is not used analogously at all or else, if it is used analogously, is so used in some other sense of "analogous” than Hartshorne presupposes in affirming that the criterion of analogical concepts is that they involve degrees. But what sense of “analogous” could this be? It seems to me to be the sense established by the following considerations: (1) among the logical-ontological type distinctions that are utterly formal and, therefore, literal is the distinction between ordinary, fragmentary individuality and extraordinary, nonfragmentary individuality; (2) therefore, all transcendental concepts—whether those explicative of reality as such, or those explicative of individuality as a distinct type of reality—though literally applicable to both ordinary, fragmentary and extraordinary, nonfragmentary individuals, cannot be so applied as to deny this equally literal difference, any more than this difference can be so asserted as to deny that the transcendental concepts in question literally apply to both types of individuality; (3) this necessarily implies, however, that all such transcendental concepts are applied to ordinary, fragmentary individuals, on the one hand, and to the extraordinary, nonfragmentary individual, on the other, analogously insofar as they are so applied as not to deny but to take account of the difference between these two types of individuality. Thus that God is one is as literally, nonanalogically true as that I am one. But, as Whitehead puts it, "there are two senses of the one—namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many." In this sense, all concepts, even literal concepts, are analogical when applied to ordinary individuals, on the one hand, and the extraordinary individual, on the other (cf. DR: 30ff.).

13. Hartshorne argues that "it seems impossible to love an unloving being with all one's own being," on the ground that, since we cannot avoid self-love and love of neighbor (or may even be commanded to do both!), these loves can be elements in our love for God “only if he loves all-inclusively" (ANTOT: 13). This, however, is to beg the question being discussed, allowing that "unloving" can be used either gnostically or agnostically. That the object of all our love must certainly be all-inclusive can indeed be inferred from our own being commanded to love with the whole of our being, for the reasons Hartshorne indicates. But to be "all-inclusive" and to "love all-inclusively" are, on the face of it, different concepts.

14. On the face of it, "modal coincidence" is no more, although no less, misleading a concept than "modal coextensiveness." If the one stresses one-sidedly the moment of identity as between God and everything else, the other stresses equally one-sidedly the moment of difference between them. "Modal all-inclusiveness,” on the other hand, would seem free of either objection and, therefore, more to the point (ANTOT: 20 f. Hartshorne himself speaks of God as “the modally all-inclusive or nonfragmentary being, surpassable only by Himself" [28; cf. 38: "modal all-inclusiveness"]; cf. LP: 34 ff., 38, 91).

15. It would appear that the conception of God as "the Worshipful One" (ANOT: 35) requires two things that, on the face of it, are incompatible. (Hartshorne allows as how one of these "seemingly opposed” requirements follows from worship, but appears to derive the other solely from the necessary conditions of the possibility of "rational argument" generally and of "natural theology" in particular [33 f.].) On the one hand, to be worshipful, God must be "the Great Exception,” "sui generis, the only possible worshipful being" (33 f.). On the other hand, if God is worshipful, God must be superior to all other beings, and this means that God must be somehow comparable with all other beings, and so not the great exception, after all; for "it is clearly nonsense to declare an entity wholly incomparable and yet compare it to all others as their superior" (35). Are not these two requirements met by saying that the difference between God and every other individual is a difference in principle, not merely a difference in degree—and, therefore, an infinite rather than a finite difference? The answer seems clear from Hartshorne's statement later that "nothing can be worshipfully superior to all and at the same time simply [sic] one more instance under ordinary categorial rules applied in the ordinary way” (62).

16. What about the relations between "scope and quality" here (ANTOT: 40)? Is the "and" in this case like, or unlike, the "and” in speaking of "God and the creature" (CSPM: 148)? If, according to Hartshorne, "the distinction between God and anything else must fall within God," because "God must not have any external ‘and ' connecting him with the natural process” (CSPM: 48,17), must one not say something analogous about “scope and quality,” or more generally, quantity and quality? In other words, by adding “and quality” to "scope,” one but explicates part of the meaning of “scope"—and vice versa. Certainly, Hartshorne is unambiguous that scope is a necessary condition of quality in the sense that fragmentary, or restricted, scope entails surpassable quality, even as only unsurpassable scope can entail unsurpassable quality. Thus he says, for example, “to be ignorant of part of what is going on outside one's body is to be partially ignorant even of what is going on inside it" (RSP: 65). The question, however, is whether the converse is also true, i.e., that quality is a necessary condition of scope in the sense that surpassable quality entails surpassable scope even as only unsurpassable quality can entail unsurpassabe scope. My contention is that this question must be answered affirmatively, in which case “scope” and "quality” mutually imply one another, either being equivalent to both. I seem to see support for this contention when Hartshorne himself elaborates “the idea of an individual interacting with others” by saying that the interaction is "not with some but with ideal wisdom," as though "ideal wisdom” were as necessarily implied by “all” as “ideal wisdom" implies “all" (ANTOT: 133). It also seems to me to be supported when Hartshorne argues from the premise that God is "modifiable and complicated by others in the highest degree, therefore by all others” to the conclusion that “all” those aspects of complexity and dependence which derive from relationship to what is external and unpossessed [sc. such as ill-will, envy, destruction] will be absent from the highest activity-passivity," and, therefore, from God. Why? Because it follows from God's being modifiable and complicated by all, others that “the others must be [God’s] internal members, for an external member, is one which, insofar as it is external, fails to modify and complicate the being to which it is external" (RSP: 138).

scope à If x can be evi1, x is fragmentary.

quality    If x is not fragmentary, x cannot be evil.

quality  à If x is supremely good, x is not fragmentary.

scope        If x is fragmentary, x is not supremely good.

 17. When Hartshorne speaks of there being "three sorts of rules," definitive respectively of (1) "individuals other than divine," (2) "all individuals whatever," and (3) "the unsurpassable individual" (ANTOT: 64), he is evidently using "rule" in much the same sense in which he speaks of "law" in the phrase "law of [a] series" (RSP: 138). Whatever he calls it, however, whether "rule" or "law," it seems clear that what he is referring to is the "formal," "literal" meaning of the concept "individual" in the three distinguishable senses in which it can be used. Thus "the logic of theism" consists in explicating the "rules" or "laws" definitive of "the unsurpassable individual" (cf. ANTOT: 134, where Hartshorne speaks of "the inherent logic of the idea of unsurpassable individual (or unsurpassable subject of interaction]"). My question is why the metaphysician as such, as distinct from the philosopher (cf. ANTOT: 132; CSPM: xiv), should want to do anything other or more than this. "No doubt," as Hartshorne himself says, "metaphors are called for, in order to move the imaginations and hearts of men"; and I see no reason why philosophy in its way, even as religion in its distinctively different way, should not involve the use of metaphors to just this end. "But the pure theory of divinity is literal, or it is a scandal, neither poetry nor science, neither well-reasoned nor honestly dispensing with reasoning" (DR: 37). Isn't it relevant in this connection that Hartshorne typically speaks of metaphysics being "logic in a broad sense" (ANTOT: 102; "A New Look at the Problem of Evil": 212; CSPM: 32 f.)?

18. What sense, if any, would it make to argue that the res significata can only be what is defined by the purely formal "rules" or "laws" explicating the “logic" inherent in the predicate? Significantly, Hartshorne argues that analogical terms differ from “the purely formal concepts" because “to apply them to things, one must know on what level of concreteness the things are," whereas purely formal terms "apply not only to individuals but to groups of individuals, and not only to concrete, but also to more or less abstract entities" (LP: 140 f.; cf. CSPM: 154 f.). But it is arguable—and Hartshorne himself in places argues—that even “purely formal terms" are “analogical," insofar as they are not always used in the same sense, even though their use, for example, to apply to individuals can be literally distinguished from their use to apply to groups of individuals, just as their use to apply to concrete entities can be literally distinguished from their use to apply to more or less abstract entities. In that case, where would be the more than merely verbal difference between so-called analogical concepts, on the one hand, and "purely formal concepts" on the other, provided what one meant by this phrase was the rules definitive of “the unsurpassable individual" as including "surpassable individuals,” and hence the rules definitive of “all individuals whatever" (ANTOT: 64)? Once "purely formal concepts" is thus delimited, what need could there be for so-called analogical concepts? Perhaps, one may think that analogical concepts are needed because, while one can literally say how God's love differs quantitatively from ours, one cannot literally say how the two loves differ qualitatively (LP: 140). But, while we may indeed not have any literal grasp of how God loves creatures—beyond knowing that, if he loves them, he loves them unsurpassably, this much as to the quality of God's love being implied by its quantity (RSP: 138)—what reason do we have to think that we have, or can have, any other kind of grasp of how God loves, or even whether God loves? If God loves, clearly, we can have no literal grasp of it. But, surely, the prior question is whether God loves, in some sense other than that involved in using the term "love” as a symbol for God's concrete relatedness to other things, which is to say, as a symbol for what the purely formal rules definitive of individuality, divine as well as non-divine, serve to make explicit.