By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
Questions:
If it's true that "no two contemporary occasions are derived from a past wholly in common" (AI: 259 f.), how can it also be true that "human experience is an act of self-origination including the whole [sic] of nature" (290)?
That occasions performing some common function in some percipient experience may thereby acquire the unity of a group for that percipient seems clear enough. But, surely, whether or not occasions constitute a nexus is independent of their performing some common function in some percipient experience. If any set of occasions in any way exhibits the basic property of "mutual immanence," it is a group-and, in particular, is the kind of group termed "nexll;s." ,And so, too, with other kinds of groups-societies, personally ordered l~fi:C;J,fJi:S~ and so on. So how can Whitehead say what he says in the openi'rlg sentence of Ch. XIII: The Grouping of Occasions?
20 October 2000