The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Hartshorne speaks of "our sense of the individual whose majesty is exalted beyond possible rivalry, the all-worshipful God" ("Whitehead and Berdyaev": 81).

But what, in point of fact, is this "sense," as distinct from any more or less clear and coherent conceptualization of it, other than what Hartshorne himself sometimes speaks of as our feeling of "the inclusive something," or what Whitehead means by "the Whole," i.e., "the one," in the sense of "the one which is all," as distinct from "the one among the many" (cf. also PRc: 228, where Whitehead similarly distinguishes between "the oneness of the universe" and "the oneness of each element in the universe")?

We certainly do sense ourselves and others as parts of the encompassing whole, so that, as Whitehead puts it, at the base of all our ordinary sense perception of ourselves and the world is a sense of "the one which is all" as well as a sense of "the one among the many." To this extent, we do indeed have a sense of "the individual whose majesty is exalted beyond possible rivalry," since being such an individual is all that the universal individual, "the one which is all," could conceivably be. Moreover, in sensing this universal individual, we may be said to have a sense of "the all-worshipful God," if all that is meant by "God" is just such a universal and, therefore, all-worshipful individual.

On the other hand, if "God" means, not merely "the inclusive something," but also "an inclusive experience, the model of all experiences in its personal unity," or "the universal consciousness, the model of which all things are 'images' or expressions," whose "essential nature" is "love in perfect form," then we do not have a sense of God in sensing the universal individual (The Divine Relativity: 39 f.; "Biology and the Spiritual View of the World": 409).

October 1996

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