The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Whitehead seems to me to have his own way of taking account of something very like what Heidegger calls Seinsvergessenheit. Thus he says in one passage: 

"Philosophy is the self-correction by consciousness of its own initial excess of subjectivity. Each actual occasion contributes to the circumstances of its origin additional formative elements deepening its own peculiar individuality. Consciousness is only the last and greatest of such elements by which the selective character of the individual obscures the external totality from which it originates and which it embodies. An actual individual, of such higher grade, has truck with the totality of things by reason of its sheer actuality; but it has attained its individual depth of being by a selective emphasis limited to its own purposes. The task of philosophy is to recover the totality obscured by the selection. It replaces in rational experience what has been submerged in the higher sensitive experience and has been sunk yet deeper by the initial operations of consciousness. The selectiveness of individual experience is moral so far as it conforms to the balance of importance disclosed in the rational vision; and conversely the conversion of the intellectual insight into an emotional force corrects the sensitive experience in the direction of morality. The correction is in proportion to the rationality of the insight.

"Morality of outlook is inseparably connected with generality of outlook. The antithesis between the general good and the individual interest can be abolished only when the individual is such that its interest is the general good . . ." (PRc: 15 [23 f.]). 

Obviously, to be obscured, or to be submerged, is not exactly the same as to be forgotten. But it is scarcely less obvious that Whitehead's account definitely converges with Heidegger's. Precisely insofar as philosophy is successful, it discloses at the secondary level of critical reflection and proper theory what is always already disclosed at the primary level of self-understanding and life-praxis—in Whitehead's terms, by reason of an individual's "sheer actuality"—namely, "the [external] totality of things" from which the selective character of the individual originates and which it embodies.

But, then, religion, also, in its way, functions, or should function, to effect just such disclosure at the primary level. How? By connecting "the rational generality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes springing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents." Thus religion involves that "conversion of the intellectual insight into an emotional force" that "corrects the sensitive experience in the direction of morality." In this sense, "[r]eligion is the translation of general ideas into particular thoughts, particular emotions, and particular purposes," and "is directed to the end of stretching individual interest beyond its self-defeating particularity" (15 [23]).

14 October 2000

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