The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Whitehead's talk of "the mutual immanence of occasions, each in the other" is, to say the least, troubling (AI: 254; cf. also, e.g., 258 f.). 

He is of course explicit in saying immediately thereafter that "[e]vidently this is not in general a symmetric relation. For, apart from contemporaries, one occasion will be in the future of the other. Thus the earlier will be immanent in the later according to the mode of efficient causality, and the later in the earlier according to the mode of anticipation" (254). But aside from the fact that the distinction between the two modes of mutual immanence is not carefully drawn – "efficient causality" properly contrasting with "final causality [or causation]," while "anticipation" properly contrasts with "reenaction" (cf., e.g., 248)—it turns out that there is, in fact, a third mode or "type," namely, "the indirect type proper to contemporary occasions" (259).

Surely, it would be better to drop all talk of "mutual immanence," which can hardly fail to connote symmetry, and to speak simply of "immanence" in its different modes or types—viz., (1) of the direct immanence of the past in the present by way of reenaction/efficient causality; (2) of the direct immanence of the future in the present by way of anticipation/final causation; and (3) of the indirect immanence of contemporary presents in each other by way of both reenaction and anticipation.

20 October 2000

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