1694. In my own way, I have long since distinguished between . . .

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1. In my own way, I have long since distinguished between (1) my relation to what I experience and (2) my relation to what I know about—or, alternatively, (1) my relation to the experience that forms the ground of my knowledge and (2) my relation to the "intentional object" of my knowledge (Rorty). For, in "Myth and Truth," e.g., I distinguish between the "field of experience" that myth objectifies, on the one hand, and the constitutive question of myth, on the other. (Actually, I make this distinction only in a confused way, insofar as, in justifying my use of the phrase "field of experience," I say that experience "has at least as many different areas [sc. fields] as there are logically distinct languages in which we represent it" [RG: 105, n. 6]. Moreover, although I assume that "two such fields of experience in particular need to be focused and distinguished if the phenomenon of myth is to be understood," this very formulation indicates my assumption that human experience has more than the two fields of "our inner nonsensuous perception of our selves and the world as parts of an encompassing whole," on the one hand, and "the outer perceptions through our senses whereby we discriminate the behaviour of all the different beings of which we are originally aware of the other." Of course, the confusion here is understandable, seeing that experience can be viewed, reasonably enough, in terms of the pluralism of the different forms of knowledge of which it is the ground. Thus we speak of "religious experience," meaning thereby that, in some way or other, in terms of some framework of inquiry constituted by some leading interest, the ground of our religious assertions and of our moral assertions is experience. Even so, there is much to be said for clearly expressing Whitehead's point, that "our more direct experience groups itself into two large divisions, each capable of further analysis" [MT: 98].

2. My most characteristic way of further explicating my relation to what I know about, however, is to appeal not to "leading interests of knowledge," but, rather, to "basic beliefs" constitutive of my existence as such. It is because of these basic beliefs that "reality," in the general sense of "what we in some way find ourselves obliged to take account of" acquires the systematic ambiguity that, in fact, characterizes the term—or, as one could say in a more Kantian way, that the several realities with which we have to do are constituted.