The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

scanned pdf

Note how Hartshorne in effect gives up his case when he argues, "Things either intrinsically refer to, 'take account of' other things, for example, past events, or they internally contain no such reference to other things. Or, in other words, there either is self-reference to other actuality, or there is not. If there is such reference, then it is at least as if the thing perceived or remembered or felt the other. For 'taking account of' is the external or spectator's indication of what internally to the thing itself [not: can only be, or can only be conceived as, but] can only be imagined as [sic!] perception or feeling or memory" (Reality as Social Process: 78; second italics added).

And note how, later in the same essay, he can transparently beg the whole question. He claims, "the more vivid is the immediate givenness of anything the more obviously does it present itself as living, and with a content of feeling in which we participate but do not create" (83). But to this I reply, No! The more vivid is the immediate givenness of anything, the more obviously does it present itself, not as "living, and with a content of feeling in which we participate but do not create," but instead as the "whence" in us of a certain content of feeling, whatever it may, or may not, be in itself. Whatever it is in itself, it has, and is experienced as having, the power to create in us, as what we are, "feeling quality." But whether our feeling quality is our feeling of its feeling quality is not in the least given, however vivid is the thing's immediate givenness to us. As for Hartshorne's claim that Croce is "mistaken" in thinking that "the feeling is all merely ours, my response is that, for all Hartshorne ever shows, as distinct from asserts, or claims, to the contrary, Croce's interpretation (as well as Russell's, the Sellars', and mine) is negative evidence against Hartshorne's certainty about what he thinks he immediately perceives.

18 May 2009

  • No labels