By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Hartshorne talks of "God's own abstractive process" as consisting in God's being "aware of the contrast between what makes [God Godself] in all possible relationships (the indifference point which constitutes [God's] necessary existence) and what {God] contingently is in [God's] actual relationships" ("Martin Buber's Metaphysics": 63 f.).
What do I make of such talk of God's being "aware"? What I make of it is that it is to be interpreted as a nonliteral-Le., symbolic, metaphorical, or anlogical-way of referring to God's being precisely what any concrete, any
I'\.
instance (or sequence of instances) of becoming, necessarily is-namely somehow "self-relating, all-integrating," God's way of being such being "unsurpassably," because God's integrating of all is "all-in-all-integrating." Only because this is literally or metaphysically so, can what Hartshorne says nonliterally or philosophically also be so.
26 February 2006