The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

SCANNED PDF

Religion as such necessarily presupposes that ultimate reality—the threefold reality of myself, others, and the whole—is not abstract but concrete. I am concrete, others are concrete, and the whole encompassing all of us as parts is also concrete. In other words, the whole is one as well as many, "the one which is all," as distinct from "the one among the many" (Whitehead).

This explains, among other things, why religion, on so many understandings (I think especially of H. R. Niebuhr's and Rudolf Bultmann's), has to do with power—power belonging, finally, to concretes. Power belongs to the concretes of the past imposing themselves on the novel process of concrescence; and power belongs to the concretes of the future objectifying the concretes in their past, including the one resulting from that same novel process. In this sense, "the many become one and are increased by one." But, again, "there are two senses of the one—namely, the sense of the one which is all, and the sense of the one among the many. . . . We are each of us, one among others, and all of us are embraced in the unity of the whole. . . .The oneness of the universe and the oneness of each element in the universe, repeat themselves . . . in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities" (Whitehead).

10 July 2007

  • No labels