The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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1. I am convinced that Hartshorne's appeal to an immediate experience of "feeling of feeling" is fallacious, except, of course, in the case of immediate memory of one's own immediately past feelings.

2. Even if one agrees with Hartshorne that our immediate experience of the body gives every indication of being "participatory," one need not accept his inference that it is cellular feeling in which we participate. All that I know is that I am internally related to, dependent upon, affected by my body and that my experience of my body has the character of feeling, so that there is, indeed, an "ultimate identity of sensation with certain forms of participatory feeling" (10: 345). But I do not know that what I'm participating in itself has the character of feeling, even if I do know this in the case of my participation in my own feelings as a self. That I can, because I do, participate in other feelings is no warrant for the inference that feelings are the only thing I can, or do, participate in.

3. Therefore, I cannot accept Hartshorne's formulations without criticism. As true as it seems to me to be that "immediate memory is participation of present experience in past experience," I do not find it true—even if it may (turn out to) be true—that "derivation of feeling from the body is participation in subhuman, cellular modes of feeling," or that "we participate in divine feelings and the divine participates in all actual feelings" (IO: 290).

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