The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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1. According to the reasoning in my notes, "Critical Theory and Revisionary Metaphysics," the passiones entis covertibiles are all constituted by the unavoidable, indispensable human interests—in the true, the good (including the just or right), and the beautiful.

2. Necessarily presupposed by these interests, however, is the interest in reality as such, as that which makes a difference, and in the oneness of reality, its whatness, its somewhatness, and so on. But this interest constitutes the passio entis convertibile. The human subject is interested in and has to take account of the real; and the real includes whatever it, in one way or another, is interested in or has to take account of. (In the first instance, the human subject's interest in the real is existential, wherefore it takes account of the real in its meaning for us, for our self-understanding and / or life-praxis. But the human subject also has an intellectual interest in the real, wherefore it also takes account of the real in its structure in itself.)

3. By "the ultimately real," then, one properly means whatever the human subject has to take account of, or have some interest in, no matter what else it may or may not have to take account of or have an interest in. And by "the strictly ultimately real," one properly means whatever any subject that is so much as conceivable would somehow have to take account of no matter what else it did or did not take account of—if only in the completely general sense of being really, internally related to it and therefore dependent on it and affected by it.

4. The passiones entis disjunctæ, by contrast are constituted wholly objectively, by the modal and, therefore, temporal distinctions between necessary and contingent, actual, possible, and necessary, etc., as well as by the distinctions between logical-ontological types, i.e., concrete and abstract, divine and nondivine; event, individual, and aggregate; individualities, species, genera, and categories, on the one hand, and transcendentals, on the other.

rev. 23 November 2001

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