By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Metaphysics, in the sense in which I understand it, proceeds on the assumption that, just as we ourselves have an inner as well as an outer aspect, so also does anything else that, like ourselves, is concrete and singular. On this assumption, then, metaphysics seeks to explicate what is perforce necessarily implied about this inner aspect of all things by all that we think, say, and do in somehow understanding ourselves, others, and the whole and leading our lives accordingly.
This distinction between the "inner" and the "outer" aspects of things is obviously of a piece with the distinctions I make between (1) the "existential" and the "empirical" aspects of experience and reality and their "vertical" and "horizontal" dimensions, and (2) "ultimate reality" and "immediate reality," or the "ultimate" and the "immediate" settings of self-understanding and life-praxis.
11 December 2005; rev. 11 December 2006
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