The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne says, rightly, that "[w]hat is inherent in experience as such . . . cannot be denied except verbally, and must be necessary and knowable a priori" (ZF: 96). But what is to be understood, exactly, by "inherent in" and "experience as such"?

For Hartshorne, obviously, what is meant by "inherent in" is not simply "included in" or "implied by," but, more broadly, "identical with" or, at least, "meant by." In my view, on the contrary, "inherent in" is taken strictly as equivalent to such phrases as "included in," "implied by," "required by," "presupposed by," and hence as predicable only of something distinct from, independent of, the "experience as such" in which it inheres. As for this second phrase, Hartshorne obviously takes it to designate the pure, analogical concept of experience, which he holds to be applicable in some more or less, even infinitely, different sense to any and all concrete entities from the least to the greatest. For me, on the contrary, "experience as such," as distinct from "human experience as such," "animal experience as such," and so on, can at most be a symbolic or metaphorical way of designating something that is included in all experience or implied by it and that can be literally designated as "concreteness as such" or "the concrete as such."

That "experience as such" necessarily implies or presupposes "concreteness as such" in no way implies the converse.

22 January 1998

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