The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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How much Whitehead's basic analysis of experience converges with (the early) Heidegger's becomes clear when he talks about ordinary conscious perception's involving a passage of "the content of the objective universe" from "the function of a basis for a new individuality to that of an instrument for purposes" (AI: 270). "Thus in our conscious perceptions appearance is dominant. It possesses a clear distinctness, which is absent from our vague massive feeling of derivation from our actual world. Appearance has shed the note of derivation. It lives in our consciousness as the world presented to us for our enjoyment and our purposes. It is the world in the guise of a subject-matter for an imposed activity" (271). 

Here, clearly, is Whitehead's way of accounting for the phenomenon that Heidegger speaks of as das Vorhandene/das Zuhandene—with the distinctive merit (either missing or not as well worked out in Heidegger) of exhibiting the connection between these forms of "appearance" and the "reality" not only of our own existence, but also of the world in which we exist as precisely "being-in-the-world." 

Also relevant is what Whitehead has to say in explaining how "the exclusive reliance on sense-perception promotes a false metaphysics." It does so, namely, because it encourages "the false notion of a substratum with vacuously inherent qualities," i.e., "devoid of self-enjoyment," "devoid of intrinsic worth" (281). It seems clear enough that being merely "an instrument for purposes," or "a subject-matter for an imposed activity," or being merely "presented to us for our enjoyment and our purposes" is simply the other side of being "devoid of self-enjoyment" and "devoid of intrinsic worth."

19 October 2000

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