By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
There is little doubt that "the particular historical experience" that I take to be required in order to verify whether or not "someone, in fact, re-presents a certain possibility of self-understanding" could only be a particular existential-historical experience, as distinct not only from "the existential experience of our own existence with others in relation to the whole," from which I then go on to distinguish it, but also from any particular empirical-historical experience, from which I do not (but certainly should) expressly distinguish it (Doing Theology Today: 137).
I say there is little doubt about this because, whether or not someone "re-presents" a certain possibility of self-understanding in the relevant sense of the words does not depend on whether or not certain empirical-historical statements about what she or he thought, said, and did can be verified by common human experience (that being what would be required by the other -- here irrelevant -- sense of saying that she or he "re-presents" [or "re-presented"] a certain possibility of self-understanding). It depends, rather, on whether or not someone is so experienced by another that she or he makes explicit to the other so experiencing her or him one of the other's own possibilities of self-understanding as the other's authentic possibility. But thus to experience someone is just what it means to have a particular existential-historical experience of her or him, mediately if not immediately.
23 February 2000; rev. 7 December 2008
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