By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
If "nothing" is understood to have any objective reference, it can only be to "pure potentiality." But, then, if what is properly meant by "the strictly necessary" is sinl.ply what all potentialities have in COlnlnon, or their least cominon denonl.inator, the strictly necessary can only be what all "nothing" has in COlnnl.On, or its least COlnmon denominator.
And so the strictly necessary could be said to be the nothing-nl.ost aspect of all nothing, objectively understood, or, as Hartshorne puts it, "that to know which is to know next to nothing": "the purely general outline of existence, totally without concrete filling"; "the outline for which all that is concretely real provides uninl.aginable richness of definite actuality"
29 January 2008