The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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                                                                   On the Concept of Re-presenting the Possibility of Authentic Existence

1.If it is true, as I should maintain, that any proper metaphysics implies that a certain self-understanding is both possible and alone authentic, then one could plausibly argue that any proper metaphysics simply as such implicitly represents a possibility of existence -- specifically, what it necessary implies as the authentic such possibility.

2. But there is a distinction to be made that this argument may obscure -- namely, between re-presenting a possibility of existence, on the one hand, and representing the general truth that there is such a possibility, on the other. What a proper metaphysics does is, not so much the first as the second: in re-presenting all general (sc. completely universal, or transcendental) truths, it also implicitly re-presents the general truth that there is a certain possibility of understanding oneself that is the only authentic such possibility. But, although this might reasonably be held to be an indirect re-presentation of the authentic possibility of self-understanding, it to be distinguished from a direct re-presentation of such a possibility, the second alone being, properly, the re-presentation of the possibility of authentic existence.

3. Thus it will hardly do to allege that the claim that Jesus decisively represents the possibility of authentic existence reduces Jesus to nothing more than the symbol of a general truth. If, or insofar as, Jesus may be properly said to be the symbol of anything, he is the symbol instead, of an existential possibility -- not merely of the general truth that there is such a possibility. And this can be said even though any re-presentation of the possibility of authentic existence, such as Jesus cm1 be said to be, necessarily implies the truth of certain metaphysical beliefs, among which is the general truth that the possibility represented is indeed possible, and is alone authentic.

28 July 1980; rev. 31 July 2009

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