The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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According to Whitehead, to give "a general description of this [sc. our own] personal unity, divesting it of minor details of humanity" is to acquire "at once the doctrine of the unity of nature, and of the unity of each human life." He continues: 

The conclusion follows that our consciousness of the self-identity pervading our life-thread of occasions, is nothing other than knowledge of a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature. It is a locus within the whole, marked out by its own peculiarities, but otherwise exhibiting the general principle which guides the constitution of the whole. This general principle is the object-to-subject structure of experience. It can be otherwise stated as the vector-structure of nature. Or otherwise, it can be conceived as the doctrine of the immanence of the past energizing in the present (Adventures of Ideas: 240 f.).

If I'm right, this is Whitehead's way of saying what I've said in answering the question, "What do we actually experience in the vertical dimension or existential aspect, of our experience?" (Notebooks, September 2000 and 10 March 2006). We experience our own oneness as individuals as "a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature," or the oneness of the universe as an individual, i.e., "the whole." And we experience therein "the general principle which guides the constitution of the whole," i.e., the whole itself and everything, ourselves and others, included within it. But what is this "general principle"? Whitehead's answer, interestingly, is not simply that it is "experience," but that it is "the structure of experience," specifically, its "object-to-subject structure," otherwise statable as "the vector-structure of nature," and otherwise conceivable as "the doctrine of the immanence of the past energizing in the present." 
In other words, Whitehead says, in his way, that we not only experience ourselves as concretes within the all-inclusive concrete that is "the whole" or "nature," but we also experience, as I put it, concrescence" -- concrescence" being simply his terminus technicus for the process of "the immanence of the past energizing in the present," the structure of which is "the object-to-subject structure of experience," or "the vector-structure of nature." 

12 December 2006

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