By Schubert Ogden
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1. In "Informal Reflections on Philosophical Anthropology," I projected an understanding of human existence according to which "the human" designates both an abstract constant and an abstract variable, which as such must have some concrete value if there is to be any actual human being at all, but which can have a relatively wide range of concrete values more or less different from one another. If as abstract constant, "the human" may be said to be homo hominans, as abstract variable, it may be said to be homo hominatus. With respect to the second, then, I distinguished between a "subjective" and an "objective" aspect, insofar as a human being is "humaned," or made by itself, both by actualizing its self-understanding either authentically or inauthentically and by externalizing-internalizing its self-understanding through the forms of culture -- explicitly culture—explicitly through the forms of religion, implicitly through all of the secular cultural forms.
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