The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne evidently tries to get more out of our immediate experience than is given in it—and that not only in one direction but in two. He tries to get "feeling of feeling" out of both what we remember and perceive of the past, including God, and what we anticipate of the future, again, including God. Thus, by his account, we feel both the feelings of others, God included, as contributory to our own feelings and the feelings of others, God again included, as bound to be contributed to in turn by our feelings.

But all that Hartshorne is entitled to get out of our immediate experience is simply that we are internally related to other concretes in the past even as we are also internally related to other concretes in the future—not, to be sure, as such, as already concrete, but as bound to be internally related to us as and when some of them, at least, become concrete. In other words, there's no more immediate experience of God qua "an inclusive experience," or "a super-experience," than there is immediate experience of the cells of our central nervous system qua "centers of feeling" on an indefinitely lower, subhuman level.

Significantly, Hartshorne is careful to explain that our immediate experience of God, although "the awareness of the whole as such," is not awareness of it "in its details distinctly seen, but in its generic character." But, surely, the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of our immediate experience of the parts of the whole, which, in addition to ourselves, are, most directly, the cells of our own bodies. They, too, we are aware of, not in their details distinctly see, but in their "generic character" as concretes.

So, as true as it may be that the only basis in direct experience for forming "a conception of the stuff of which nature is composed" is our feeling of our own bodies, whether or in what sense the parts of our bodies that we most directly experience are "sentient" is nothing that direct experience itself delivers. All that it delivers is that we are concretes internally related to other concretes, some of which are indefinitely beneath us and one of which is infinitely above us.

25 April 2005

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