By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
1. Human existence is the actualization of the human essence somehow—in some actual state and in some mode of actualization, authentic or inauthentic.
2. The human essence is to exist, not in the ordinary sense of simply being somehow actualized, but in the emphatic sense of being understandingly—of somehow understanding oneself in relation to others and the whole.
3. Therefore, human existence as the actualization of existence in this emphatic sense somehow—in some actual state and in some mode of actualization—is always actualized by the event of self-understanding. We exist humanly in the event of somehow understanding ourselves, others, and the ultimate whole of reality of which we are each an understanding/self-understanding part.
4. In this sense, self-understanding is the constitutive event of human existence, the event that constitutes the human existent as such and that never fails to occur as soon and as long as there is any distinctively human existence at all.
5. Because this is so, one may say that, in one sense of the word "revelation," which may be distinguished as "original revelation," the event of self-understanding as the constitutive event of human existence is itself the event of revelation, i.e., the disclosure of the ultimate whole of reality in its meaning for us, and thus as authorizing—entitling and empowering—our authentic self-understanding.
6. In this sense, revelation is not, and cannot be, simply one event among others, but is the unique event which, being constitutive of human existence, has always already occurred as soon and as long as there is any human existence at all. It is the event in which the ever-new act of the ultimate whole of reality is somehow responded to understandingly by the ever-new act of faith or of unfaith.
n.d.
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