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On Authority

1. The primal ontic source of all authority can only be reality itself, even as its primal noetic source can only be common human experience. What is somehow authorized by experience of reality as corresponding to it or agreeing with it is insofar authoritative; what is not thus authorized is insofar not authoritative.

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4. As for immediate reality in the first respect, it is the primal ontic source authorizing true science, in the sense of explicit understanding of immediate reality in its structure in itself. In the second respect of its meaning
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for us, immediate reality is the primal ontic source authorizing true technology and true policy, moral and political in the sense of explicit understanding of how, in fact, we are to act and what we are to do regarding means as well as ends consistently with immediate reality's having the structure in itself that true science shows it to have.

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7. But no religious tradition is constituted as such simply by its primary authority or formal norm and whatever secondary authorities or norms it in turn authorizes or norms. Any authority, properly so-called, is and must be authorized by a source beyond itself, just as any norm in the proper sense can only be, in the theological term, a "normed norm" (norma normata), even if what norms it, although the source of its normativeness, is not itself a norm in the same proper sense. Therefore, any religious tradition is also constituted -- indeed, is constituted, first of all! -- by an explicit primal source of authority and therefore of normativeness as well. To be sure, the primal source of a tradition's authority insofar as it is authorized is reality itself as experienced -- more exactly, ultimate reality as experienced in its meaning for us (cf. I, 3). But ultimate reality in its
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meaning for us, even as in its structure in itself, remains merely implicit and cannot function as the primal ontic source of authority for any religious tradition except through some explicit primal ontic source of authority corresponding to it, or agreeing with it, in its meaning for us. This explicit primal ontic source of a tradition's authority is the explicit self-understanding/ understanding of existence constituting it as a religious tradition whose claim to decisive authority, and thus also to be the formally true religion, is a valid claim. As such, a religion's explicit primal ontic source of authority is itself authorized -- namely, by ultimate reality itself functioning as the implicit primal ontic source of all religious and existential authority. And yet, although it is indeed thus authorized, it is not, in the proper sense, an authority, not even the (i.e., primary) authority, for its religious tradition. For although any religious authority, properly so-called, is itself also a source of authority, the converse statement is false: not every source of authority is itself also an authority in the proper sense of the term.

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