1508. All thought is about something . . .

SCANNED PDF

"All thought is about something, never about sheer nothing." Nor is it ever just about itself. "A thought is always about something other than just itself." But what is thought about? 

"The indispensable minimum of what thought is about is creative becoming" and its creatures—"the temporal process and its actual or conceivable products." It is "the creativity . . . and its manifestations, . . . other than which there is nothing for thought to think, whether as actual or as possible." "The indispensable referent of all meaning" is creativity, since to think at all is to think about something either actual or possible and the creative process but for which it would not and could not be either. Ordinarily, we are thinking explicitly or thematically about something either actual or possible. But implicitly at least we must also be thinking about the creativity of which anything actual is the product and of which anything possible could be the product—just this being what it means to say that something is actual or possible. So, too, even when we think explicitly or thematically about the creative process or its indispensable aspect, we cannot fail to think at least implicitly or nonthematically about its actual or possible products, if not extensionally, then intensionally. 

There is evidently a parallel here with classical metaphysics, for which "the indispensable minimum of what thought is about" is being and its manifestations, i.e., beings, actual or possible. In this scheme, to think about any being, actual or possible, is at least implicitly to think about being and its indispensable aspect. The difference, as Hartshorne rightly stresses, is only in what is understood to be "the category of the ultimate." This means, among other things that, just as in Hartshorne's view, there is a difference between creativity, on the one hand, and God as its indispensable aspect, on the other, so in a classical view such as Rahner's, there is a difference between being, on the one hand, and God as "the absolute being," and so the indispensable aspect of being, on the other.