An Aristotelian realist -- and Hartshorne is one -- holds that the problem of universals has to do with accounting for how
similarities and identities develop in the concrete flow of events.
Along with Peirce and Weiss, Hartshorne holds that particulars are
completely determinate, and therefore can only be past events, and that
universals are somewhat indeterminate, and can therefore characterize
only the future. ‘When universals are abstracted from the concrete
particulars, characters are derived from the past as vague
potentialities for future realization. In this sense, all potentiality
derives from concrete actuality, an Aristotelian thesis. This makes
sense of Hartshorne’s contention in his chapter "Abstraction the
Question of Nominalism," that the novel forms emergent in a creative
event are not determinate before the event but become determinate by
decision in the event; to deny this is to deny any real meaning to
creativity. For the Aristotelian position, the real problem is to
explain how forms get into the temporal process, and it makes sense to
say that they emerge.
The Aristotelian story of how the universals come to be relevant to
and function in the process of concrete events is compatible with the
Platonic account of how change depends on its formal possibility.
Platonists like Whitehead provide theories about the ingression of forms
in things through prehension of the past as well as theories about the
constitution of formal possibility as such in terms of eternal objects,
the divine primordial decision, and the like. Whitehead unfortunately
failed to emphasize the fact that eternal objects are norms, and had to
say that eternal objects are empty except insofar as they are graded as
relevant to the world by God. But his theory of propositional valuation
is congenial for interpreting the eternal objects as norms, given
determinate shape by the components they must measure together.
What sense does it make to say a universal is
contained in a concrete particular? It is clear that an instance of a
universal can be so contained. (Perhaps it is better to say that the
concrete particular itself is an instance of the universal, and perhaps
of several other universals also. Or perhaps the preferable language is
to speak of the particular as instancing the universal.) In what sense
is the universal contained in the particular when the latter is
an instance of it? To this kind of question, two kinds of answers
falling within the "realist" camp have been given. They can be called,
for historical reasons, Aristotelian realism and Platonic realism.
An emergent universal is nonsense to a Platonist, however. For a
Platonist the only things that can change or come to be axe those
essentially related to the existential temporal process, e.g. things
that make decisions -- events, and the like. A universal is that by which we measure change and diversity as well as continuity. As Plato argued in the Parmenides,
instances of forms can be alike or similar, but there is no similarity
between the instances and the universal itself; otherwise you get into a
third-man argument. So in a sense universals are not things, desiccated
shapes imaging or being imaged in concrete particulars; rather they are
norms, indeterminate in themselves, but determinate as measures of how
the particular components of a complexity ought to go together. For a
Platonist it is possible to abstract the pattern of a concrete thing and
call it the form of the thing; but this is a shortcut to speaking the
truth. The pattern is no more the universal than is the concrete thing
so patterned; the only advantage of the pattern is that we can imagine
it to be found in other particulars. But as Hartshorne. Weiss and others
so well point out, concrete particulars always differ in their overall
patterns; in fact, difference in individual identity comes down to
difference in determinate pattern. The universal or form itself is the
value finding embodiment in the world in "a certain way."
Two
particulars are alike because the same value measures their similar
components with a pattern ingredient in both. Their components are
similar by virtue of being measured by the same component values, and so
on down. The causal reason why things are similar may well be that they
both prehend the same past events, and therefore have the same
components to be measured in their own subjective forms. But the
metaphysical reason for the possibility of similarity and difference,
according to the Platonic realist, consists in the fact that value can
be ingredient with multiplicity in different parts of a process only by
virtue of different structures or patterns. As a Platonist would say,
the structured world is a compromise between chaos and the Good. There
is ultimately only one real universal, the Form of the Good. We
distinguish different forms because there are similar patterns of
complexities recurring and therefore exhibiting similar patterns, each
one of which seems to name a universal.
Whereas the Aristotelian story is about how universals appear in the
historical process -- and in that sense they do seem to emerge -- the
Platonic story is about how determinateness is possible. Regarding the
latter, a decision to make pattern X ingredient in oneself as a measure
of components a, b, c, is not possible unless X is indeed a way of
measuring a, b, c, . . . together. Whether a, h, c,.. are measurable by X
is totally irrelevant to whether a, b, c, . . . are in fact actual in
the temporal process. The relation between the pattern in which the form
measures the pattern’s components and the patterns of the components is
quite eternal. Of course, if the components are never actualized in the
real process, that relation is totally irrelevant to the course of
events. But whether universals are relevant to the world makes no
difference to the universals, conceived in this Platonic sense.
Aristotelians, however, have been less charitable in allowing the
importance of both kinds of problems about universals. They assume that
universals themselves must be like the instances of them in particulars,
and then say the Platonic account ascribing independent existence to
them is forced to believe in ghostly, wraithlike, disembodied essences.
In discussing Platonism Hartshorne himself says, "I do not believe that a
determinate color is something haunting reality from all eternity, as
it were, begging for instantiation (p. 59). In light of what the
Aristotelians are trying to explain, universals can be treated as
patterns derived from past actualities. But thc function of universals
to explain the Platonist’s problem of formal possibility precludes their
being conceived as proceeding from actuality; they are necessarily the
antecedent condition of actuality. The Platonic universal for some
determinate color is the value that would be actualized if certain
refracted light waves and certain conditions of perception are patterned
a certain way; in no sense does the universal beg for instantiation,
although the concrete world might be better if the color were
instantiated.
And so whereas I have no important complaints to make about the
positive things Hartshorne says about universals, since he is giving a
good account of the Aristotelian problem, his negative points are
ill-taken. It is a great mistake to reject all Platonic theories of
universals, such as Whitehead’s regarding eternal objects (not that
Whitehead’s particular account is necessarily satisfactory). This
mistake has serious ramifications for Hartshorne’s view.
Return to his claim that the abstract is contained in the concrete
exhaustively, that is, that the union of the abstract and the concrete
is simply the concrete. With respect to how universals are ingredient in
the world, this claim presents no problem. Universals are structures in
the past abstracted as potentialities for actualization in the present,
and they have no reality in the world except as potentialities; the
concrete realization of them contains them. But with respect to the
formal possibility of those universal structures, Hartshorne’s theory
gives no account. That they are actually possible is not the issue,
since they were actualized in the past. From the Platonist’s side, the
interesting question is why certain forms of togetherness are coherent
and others not, why certain forms have great harmony and others little
or none. Unless this kind of question is addressed, the ontological
structure of the world is taken for granted, not made intelligible.
Although the question of how this or that form gets ingredient in the
world is interesting, the more interesting question is what structure
is, how it unifies multiplicity, how it stands related to chaos.
Pushed far enough -- and Hartshorne would surely push it that far --
the claim that structure itself needs an explanation might be thought
self-contradictory. First principles are structures, and what could lie
behind a first principle? But then, as Peirce said, the only thing that
does not need an explanation is pure chaos; order is most of all in need
of explanation, and the explanation of a state of affairs in terms of
first principles is not as penetrating as the explanation of the first
principles themselves. Whereas Hartshorne cites Peirce’s categories as
illustrations of eternal metaphysical principles (in contrast to
emerging ones), Peirce himself thought his categories of Firstness,
Secondness and Thirdness evolved, evolution being the only way to
explain the origin of order from chaos (7: pars 12-13). Whitehead in his
turn, as Lewis Ford has pointed out, claimed that anything complex
needs an explanation in a decision somewhere, and even the metaphysical
structures of the world are the result of the divine primordial act
giving order to the otherwise chaotic eternal objects (cf. 2). Admitting
that difficulties can be raised with both Peirce’s and Whitehead’s
accounts, some account of the formal possibility of potentialities is
necessary.
