The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I find it fascinating that Hartshorne can, in places, argue against himself on the question of whether metaphysics is a matter solely and simply of logical analysis or also of "generalizing analogy." Thus, for example, he can say over against Pepper's classification of metaphysical systems according to differences between "root metaphors":

A metaphor, root or not, is a rhetorical device and not the final measure of a system's significance. . . . Whitehead uses several basic metaphors, thus: 'organism,' 'cell,' 'prehension,' or 'house its actual (past) world.' None of these metaphors by itself identifies what is most significant in his philosophy. Whitehead is too much a mathematician and physicist for that. He is interested above all in the logical patterns exhibited in reality: What depends upon what, what is independent of what; are there necessary and sufficient conditions, or only necessary conditions, for what happens? These are literal, not metaphorical questions. Whitehead is also interested in how abstractions are to be accounted for in terms of concrete experience. . . . All these terms [sc. 'machine,' 'organism,' 'form,' 'matter'] require phenomenological grounding. The only ultimate analogy or metaphor is human experiencing as for us the primary sample of concrete actuality (Creativity in American Philosophy: 205 f.) .

It's not easy to decide what is more striking in this passage. Is it the sharp juxtaposition of "the final measure of a system's significance" and "a metaphor, root or not," as, simply, "a rhetorical device"? Or is it the flat-out classification of "prehension," not as a "concept" (as in the earlier chapter in the same book entitled, "Whitehead's Concept of Prehension" [103-113]), but as, precisely, a "metaphor"? Or is it the use in the last sentence of the formulation, "ultimate analogy or metaphor," instead of "ultimate metaphor or analogy," which would at least leave room for the threefold distinction he elsewhere tries to make between both "metaphorical" and "literal" predications and "analogical" ones?

Anyhow, to be oriented by what Hartshorne says here is to define metaphysics as I do as precisely and only logical analysis ("transcendental deduction") of the necessary presuppositions of any and all meaning, leaving even "human experiencing" as no more than the "primary sample of concrete reality" from which such analysis (or deduction) proceeds.

20 December 2005

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