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I should prefer to make this same point, however, in somewhat different terms. Instead of speaking of the "religious question" and "the metaphysical aspects of life which religion expresses," "the metaphysical curiosity and anxiety," etc., I should speak of the "existential question" and of "the existential aspects of life," etc. Religion, properly understood, is the primary form of culture in which the existential question is explicitly asked and answered. This existential question is the question about the ultimate meaning of human life, or about the meaning of ultimate reality for us as human beings. As such, it presupposes that there is such a(n ultimate) meaning, and it perforce has both a metaphysical and a moral aspect, in that it asks at one and the same time about the ultimate reality of our own existence -- which existence—which is to say, ourselves, others, and the whole -- and whole—and about how we should understand ourselves and lead our lives accordingly. But the metaphysical aspect of the properly existential question is one thing, the properly metaphysical question, something else; and this is so even though the two questions are closely related. Whereas the first asks more concretely about the meaning of ultimate reality for us, the second asks more abstractly about the structure of ultimate reality in itself. In other words, the aspects of life that religion expresses are its "existential aspects," and they may be said to be "metaphysical" only in that the question about their structure in themselves, as distinct from their meaning for us, is the proper question of metaphysics.

As for philosophy, it, too, is addressed to the existential question to which religion is addressed, albeit as a secondary, rather than as a primary form of culture. ("Philosophy," Whitehead says, "is a secondary activity. It meditates on this variety of [sc. cultural] expression.") For this reason, there is a point in Hartshorne's saying that philosophy's "most important function" is to clarify "the religious question," since religion itself is addressed to the existential question. But considering that the "variety of expression" on which philosophy mediates meditates is hardly exhausted by religion but encompasses the whole of human culture, it seems more appropriate to say that philosophy's most important function is to clarify the existential question. In performing this function, naturally, philosophy, also, has a metaphysical as well as a moral aspect -- oraspect—or, if you will, includes metaphysics as well as ethics.

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