1531. I find it interesting . . .

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I find it interesting—and instructive—that, in certain earlier writings, Hartshorne seems to rely on a distinction between "events" and "(fixed) structures" as more or less equivalent to my distinction between "events" and "abstracts." Thus he says in one essay, "'Process' in its most inclusive sense is what now-becomes, including past events and fixed structures as constituent 'data' (to human beings, largely hidden or unconscious). . . . Process philosophy will grant all sorts of fixity; but that in reality or in God which can be named at any time, and once for all, it views as abstract a common denominator or fixed structure of various becomings, various referents of various uses of 'this becoming now.' To refute doctrines which deny fixed structures, yes, eternally fixed and necessary ones, is to talk about something other than systematic process metaphysics" ("Tillich's Doctrine of God": 172 f.).

In another, clearly parallel passage, he says: "Process philosophy, in its mature forms, holds that process includes all the fixed being that anyone needs or can conceive: (1) past events of process as immortally remembered or objectified . . . in all subsequent process—adequately only in the divine process; (2) the universal structures generic to process as such in the form of abstract constituents of any and all units of process; (3) the emergent structures as less abstract constituents of process subsequent to the emergence" (169). Clearly, the distinction between "universal structures generic to process as such" and "emergent structures" exactly parallels the distinction Hartshorne also makes in this essay between "'pure' potentiality,' or "potentiality itself, coincident with ultimate possibility, the logically conceivable," and "all 'real' potentials, that is, those limited to some definite circumstance or moment of process" (179; cf. 180, where he also distinguishes between "the infinite pure potentiality" and "a region of potentiality to which any given actuality relates itself as that which it actualizes [and thus includes as its relatum]"). 

Or, again, in a discussion of what is meant by "enduring individuality" according to "the theory that events are the full actualities," Hartshorne argues that, although an individual is indeed to be understood as "a sequence of events or occasions, each objectifying its predecessors," these several momentary selves or subjects "are for many important purposes 'the same,' and really the same. For there is a literally identical individuality structure, but (as follows from the inclusiveness of process) it is the successive occasions which have the common structure, not the common structure which has the occasions" (171).

March 1998