By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
What is it to be alive?
To be alive is minimally—in terms of structure in abstraction from content—to be an individual, as distinct from an event, and, as such, to have both a settled past, in the sense of having already been somehow actualized, concretized, or particularized, and an open future, in the sense of still to be somehow further actualized, concretized, or particularized.
To be eminently alive, then, is to be the universal individual, in the sense of the one and only conceivable individual whose settled past includes all actuality and whose open future includes all possibility.
3 May 2009
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