The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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Sometimes I've thought and written as though experience of ourselves (as well as others and the whole) were only such experience as we have nonsensuously. At other times, I have allowed that there is indeed sense as well as nonsensuous experience of ourselves, but only of such of ourselves as we can experience through our five senses. 

Hartshorne, however, speaks of sensation more broadly as simply the what or content of our experience, as distinct from its that or structure as creative synthesis. Thus he says, for example, "Every experience has an aspect of sense perception, and also an aspect of self-awareness, or awareness of experience itself. The latter includes, or perhaps consists in, memory—in part 'immediate memory' the sense of just having felt or sensed or thought a certain something" (Whitehead's Philosophy: 114). But this evidently opens up a possibility of saying something more than, or, at least, different from, anything I've so far had to say about our experience of ourselves. 

In this connection, I think my metaphor of horizontal and vertical dimensions of experience may be even more apt and revealing than I've realized. Immediate experience of immediate reality constitutes the horizontal dimension, whereas ultimate experience of ultimate reality constitutes the vertical dimension. But, then, there is a horizontal dimension of my experience of myself as self or subject of experience as well as of others as its objects—and, more vaguely still, of the whole. 

It would appear, accordingly, that psychology as more than merely behavioristic would be based on this horizontal dimension of my experience of myself, whereas the existentialist analysis included in transcendental metaphysics in the broad sense would be based on the vertical dimension of my experience—as would, of course, transcendental metaphysics in the strict sense.

26 November 2005

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