By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
I obviously use "action" in more than one sense.
I use it in a proper, if not a narrow, sense when I contrast it with "self-understanding" or "existence," or use it synonymously with "life-praxis" (as I do, for instance, in Doing Theology Today: 116, 144, 148 ).
But I also use it—or clearly imply I would use it—in a broad sense. This is evident simply from my talk of "actualizing" (or, occasionally, "enacting") self-understanding, or of self-understandfing "actualizing" existence in the emphatic sense of understanding, or human, existence (see, e.g., 111, 145). But it becomes explicitly clear in the summary of my view of 13 November 1993, where I define "the broadly moral" as "having to do with human action in relation to, or in the context of, reality," and then go on to say that my further distinction between "the categorial" and "the transcendental" applies to "the broadly moral" as well as to "the broadly natural," because "life-praxis" refers to the categorial level of human action, even as "self-understanding" refers to its transcendental level.
23 March 2001
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