By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
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 through the forms of religion, implicitly through all of the secular cultural forms.
2. Significantly, this same basic structure appears, albeit in quite different terms, in the metaphysical anthropology presented schematically in "The Metaphysics of Faith and Justice." There I distinguish between "human existence or self-understanding," on the one hand, and "human action," on the other, and argue that the self's possibilities are always limited by social and cultural structures. Actually, this might be thought to be a certain specification of the earlier basic structure, rather than simply a reformulation of it, insofar as "culture" may be reasonably understood to have a broader meaning than "action."
3. The same would be true, presumably, if one distinguished, as I now incline to do, between "self-understanding" and "praxis," the second so understood as to include "belief" and "action" as its theoretical and practical aspects respectively. The significant point, however, is that there is a certain consistency or constancy in my anthropological reflections, insofar as I have never been any more satisfied with a merely naturalistic or sociologistic understanding of human existence than I have with a merely idealistic or existentialist understanding of it.
31 December 1986
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