883. That experiences have qualities...

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That experiences have qualities is clear enough, as is the fact that if we have any experience of reality as such, it is our experience of our own experiences as having such qualities.

But I never experience my own experiences except in a context in which I experience other things, somehow distinct from my experiences. Every experience has both an aspect of perception in the sense of impersonal memory and an aspect of memory in the sense of personal (or self-) perception, sense perception being distinct from both. Evidently, the objects most immediately remembered impersonally, however dimly and inadequately, are the objects comprising my own nervous system; for perception in the sense of impersonal memory is a direct intuition of some part of the neural process in my own body. The objects thus remembered as then given in my sense perception of them are qualitatively determined, in that to perceive the objects and to have a certain kind of qualitative experience are one and the same thing. Thus insofar as science for its purposes abstracts from the qualitative in experience, or treats it simply as a pointer or index to observable behavior, and hence mathematically formulable structures of relations and of relations of relations, there is more to our experience and to the objects our experience perceives than science takes into account.

The question, however, is whether it is necessary to say, as Hartshorne does, that this more, this qualitative more from which science abstracts, is a qualitative determination of the objects of our experience as well as of our experiences themselves. "The world is not just a bunch of mathematical formulas," he contends. "So what's really there? What kind of quality do things have? You have all these relations and relations of relations but surely you need a qualitative aspect to make a concrete reality" ("A Conversation with Charles Hartshorne at Hiram College": 9). But is this all so sure? Even if one quite agrees with Hartshorne that our own qualitative experiences of objects cannot be simply identified with the more of objects themselves from which science abstracts except by falling into the extreme anthropomorphism of phenomenalism, does one have to accept his assumption that the concrete as such is qualitatively determined?

Perhaps the answer depends on how one understands this phrase, "qualitatively determined." In context, it is presumably used to characterize our experiences, which do indeed have qualities and in this sense are qualitatively determined. But to use the same phrase to talk about the objects of our experience is to beg the question at issue -- the question, namely, whether the objects of our sense perception are analogous to ourselves in being qualitatively determined experiences. The alternative is to take experiences having qualities as a special case of concretes or subjects having properties and relations -- the latter being given in our experience itself as (one of) the necessary condition(s) of its possibility. On this alternative, the least one would have to say about the objects of our sense perception is that they are concretes or subjects having properties and relations and that our experience of their properties and relations takes the form of our having a certain kind of qualitatively determined experience. But perhaps this is also the most that one could say within the limits of our experience and language. Even if one holds that our own experience as we experience it is the only sample of concrete reality clearly given to us, one may decline to take that experience as the prime analogate for an analogia entis. It is more properly taken as including in the strictly necessary conditions of its possibility the structure of concreteness as such, which includes, among other things, a concrete or subject being determined by properties, themselves derived by way of its internal relations to yet other concretes or subjects similarly determined.

n.d.; rev. 13 February 2010