The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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According to Whitehead/ to give "a general description of this [5C. our own] personal unity, divesting it of Ininor details of humanity" is to acquire "at once the doctrine of the unity of nature, and of the unity of each human life." He continues: 

The conclusion follows th8t our consciousness of the self-identity pervading our life-thread of occasions! is nothing other th8n knowledge of a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature. it is a locus within the whole! marked out by its own peculi8rities! but otherwise exhibiting the general principle which guides the constitution of the whole. The is general principle is the objectto-subject structure of experience. It C8n otherwise stated as the vectorstructure of nature. Or otherwise/ it Can be conceived as the doctrine of the immanence of the past energizing in the present (Adventures of Ideas: 240 f.).

If I'm right, this is Whitehead's way of saying what I've said in answering the question, "What do we actually experience in the vertical dimension or existential aspect, of our. experience?" (Notebooks, September 2000 and 10 March 2006). We experience our own oneness as individuals as "a special strand of unity within the general unity of nature," or the oneness of the universe as an individual! i.e., "the whole." And we experience therein "the general principle which guides the constitution of the whole/' i.e., the whole itself and everything, ourselves and others, included within it. But what is this "general principle"? Whitehead's answer, interestinglYI is not simply that it is "experience," but that it is "the structure of experience," specifically, its "object-to-subject structure/' otherwise statable as "the vectorstructure of nature," and otherwise conceivable as "the doctrine of the inlmanence of the past energizing in the present." 

In other words, Whitehead says, in his way, that we not only experiencei'ourselves as concretes within the all-inclusive concrete that is "the whole" or "nature/' but we also experience, as I put it, concrescence"concrescence" being simply his terminus techniclfs for the process of "the immanence of the past energizing in the present," the structure of which is "the object-to-subject structure of experience/ or "the vector-structure of nature." 

12 December 2006

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