By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
There appears to be a genuine convergence between Whitehead's reflections on understanding the past and Bultmann's insistence on the hermeneutical significance of the tua res agitur, and on the most subjective interpretation's also being the most objective. Thus he says in one place:
"[T]he definition of culture as the knowledge of the best that has been said and done, is so dangerous by reason of its omission. It omits the great fact that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past. Only the adventurous can understand the greatness of the past. In its day, the literature of the past was an adventure. . . . But adventures are to the adventurous. Thus a passive knowledge of the past loses the whole value of its message. A living civilization requires learning; but it lies beyond it" (AI: 360).
25 October 2000
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