Spencer Heath Archive

Item 1926

Thought: Fordham University Quarterly, Vol.XXIX, No.114, Autumn 1954. Greene, Theodore M. “The Ontological Dimension of Experience.” Heavily annotated in pencil by Heath at Harvey Mudd College, Claremont, California.

May 1961

 

 

 

357/

“THE ONTOLOGICAL DIMENSION

     OF EXPERIENCE”

 

/Retitled:/ THE ONTOLOGICAL, THE NON-OBJECTIVE AND THUS NON-MEASURABLE DIMENSION OF EXPERIENCE.

 

“I want to isolate and describe the impact upon us, and the import for us, of what we accept and respond to as ‘real.’”

 

 

How shall we identify what is “real”?

 

Can we experience reality merely as “being” and apart from events?”

 

 

358/

“Even games, the least important of human activities, seem to have an ontological dimension of their own ..” [Emphasis by Heath]

 

 

Is any “activity” a being, or is it a doing, a state or a proceeding — process, a condition or an event, or succession of events?

 

 

361/

“We can really gamble, that is, gamble seriously, only as the gamble seems to us to involve real risks.” [Emphasis given]

 

 

Real in what sense?

 

“I cannot help believing that, somehow, mathematics differs in kind from the most challenging of games, for example, from chess, and that it is its ontological orientation which gives mathematics its distinction and its dignity.” [Emphasis by Heath]

 

Subjective.

 

“I am no mathematician but, at the risk of error or even nonsense, I should like to venture a tentative description of the distinctive quality or feel of pure mathematical thinking. Such thinking, even in its simpler forms, is man’s only secular encounter with absolute precision and absolute purity, with a subject matter antiseptically free of all spatio-temporal necessity and of all the confusions and compromises of historical contingency? [The foregoing sentences marked with an X as important.] Is not this (experience) our nearest secular analog to the reported rapturous visions of the mystic — visions which seem, to him, to be indubitable encounters with perfect spiritual purity?”

 

 

Probably. Yes.

 

Which is the more real? Is it the “existing” bullet or the transitory passing event? Is it the bullet or is it the process, the proceeding, the event? Is there any actual “reality” apart from happenings or events? Is not the “encounter” itself an event, an action rather than an existence or being?

     Is not all action objective, physical; all being subjective, meta-physical?

 

 

364/

“I myself find it hard to escape the conclusion that man encounters, in pure mathematics, the wholly abstracted structure of a universal and eternal Logos — a structure which is given with a character of its own, by whatever arbitrary definitions, axioms, postulates or rules the mathematician may insinuate himself into this structure in order to explore different aspects of its infinite richness. If there is any merit in this suggestion, we would once again seem to find in a distinctive generic human experience an ontological dimension of crucial import.” [Emphases by Heath]

 

 

Yes, but in order that it shall possess relevant and meaningful reality for this objective physical world of action, all its postulates must rest on what the physical senses report to the consciousness concerning the composition of concrete physical actions or events.

 

 

365/

“The scientist, in his role of pure scientist (so goes the argument), does not need to believe in an objective spatio-temporal world with an ontological status of its own. All he needs to believe in is an order or pattern of possible and actual human observations upon which he can base his mathematico-scientific formulae — formulae whose sole value, in turn, consists in making possible predictions of future observations . .”

 

 

Yes, but all rationality has great esthetic and inspirational non-objective value to the human spirit and mind. The quest for this beauty of understanding is the main motivation.

 

“Nor need we question the intrinsic satisfaction of a progressively aroused and partially satisfied intellectual interest in the successes and failures of scientific prophecy. Even if it lacks all ontological reference, science can still, I am sure, be a fascinating game.”

 

 

366/

 

[All of Paragraph 5 from “soaring elm” onward, marked as important.]

 

 

367

“This ‘communion’ of the sculptor with his medium is, of course, typical of the true artist in every art.”

 

 

.. as of God in Genesis.

 

[Second and third paragraphs on this page marked as important.]

 

 

 

369/

“Nor can there be any serious doubt that this reality or being of a work of art is a reality or being which embodies a value of its own. It is quite impossible to dissociate the experienced value of a work of art from its experienced reality as art. Its ontological dimension is simultaneously its value dimension; we encounter art’s value in encountering its artistic being, and vice versa.”

 

 

Dimension in what kind of units?

 

 

“The ontological dimension is surely so clearly apparent in this context as to require no special exposition or defense.”

 

 

How is it measured?

 

 

371

“..the experiencing self should be conceived of in both affirmative and negative terms; as possessing certain characteristics or traits because of which it can be said to lack and to need something which it does not yet possess [do], or which it possesses [does] only incompletely.”

 

372

 

Nature has its conceptual counterpart implicit in abstract human reason — orderly and rational activity of the imagination.

 

 

373

 

 

The “game” is only imaginary except as it is played. It thus and thus only has the reality of experience — of objective events.

 

 

“It is our sense of this indefinite, this ever-something-more, which piques our scientific curiosity and spurs us on and on to continued exploration.”

 

 

Horizons are sought not merely for themselves but for what beckons beyond.

 

 

 

374/

“..the mystery of life is not lessened by biological study — indeed, the biologist’s sense of the ultimate mystery of life may well be enhanced by his progressive discovery of the phenomenological complexity of all living things.”

 

 

He seeks always deeper understanding as generalized knowledge —the simple unifying principle at the core of the utmost complexity. That knowledge is most real and thus most Divine which is most single yet most universal to the particulars in all complexities.

 

 

375/

“These responses, however, are surely reserved for those who are fortunate enough to be endowed with the requisite capacity and discipline.”

 

 

 

Reserved for those who are capable of being inspired. Those who can dwell conceptually in the realm of orderly imagination, of Reason and Beauty.