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I now realize, after a recent close re-reading, that my distinction between the two dimensions or aspects of experience as respectively "vertical" and "horizontal," or "existential" and "empirical," is simply my way of naming the very things to which Whitehead refers when he says, "Our more direct experience groups itself into two large divisions, each capable of further analysis," and continues:

One division is formed by the sense of qualitative experience derived from antecedent fact, enjoyed in the personal unity of present fact, and conditioning future fact. In this division of experience, there are the sense of derivation from without, the sense of enjoyment within, and the sense of transmission beyond. This complex sense of enjoyment involves the past, the present, the future. It is at once complex, vague, and imperative. It is the realization of our essential connection with the world without, and also of our own individual existence \[_sic\!_\], now. It carries with it the placing of our immediate experience as a fact in history, derivative, actual, and effective. It also carries with it the sense of immediate experience as the essence of an individual fact with its own qualities. The main characteristic of such experience is complexity, vagueness, and compulsive intensity. In one respect the vagueness yields a comparatively sharp cut division, namely, the differentiation of the world into the animal body which is the region of intimate, intense, mutual expression, and the rest of nature where the intimacy and intensity of feeling fails to penetrate. . . . The behaviour-system of the body has an element of direct relationship with the transitions of quality in personal experience. This directness is lacking in the relationship of the external world to the flux of feeling. . . . . The behaviour-systems of the human body and of intimate experience are closely entangled.

The second division of human experience has a character very different from the first division of bodily feelings. It lacks the intimacy, the intensity, and the vagueness. It consists of the discrimination of forms as expressing external natural facts in their relationship to the body. Let this division be termed 'sense-perception.'

Now sense-perception belongs to the higher animals.... \[As we know it in human experience, i\]t is a sophisticated derivative from the more primitive bodily experience which constitute\[s\] the division of experience first considered. But it has outgrown its origin, and has inverted every emphasis. Its  primary characteristic is clarity, distinctness, and indifference (_MT{_}r 71 ff.)

Incidentally, I find it interesting that Whitehead himself can think and speak in terms of "aspects" as well as "divisions" of experience -- as when he says, e.g., "The starting point of philosophy is the determination of that aspect of experience which most fully exhibits the universal necessities of existence" (113).

8 August 2001