The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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What is the relation, exactly, between the ontic and the noetic moments of the explicit primal source of authority?

The relation between these two moments is one of interdependence, in the sense that each moment in some respect depends on the other. If the ontic moment is the given, preexisting reality experienced as primal authorizing source, the noetic moment is the immediate experience of that given preexisting reality as this primal authorizing source. But just what does this mean?

One suggestion is to understand the noetic moment as necessarily presupposing a more or less explicit question concerning a primal source of authority and as itself consisting in experiencing the given, preexisting reality as the answer to this question, and hence as precisely thus primally authorizing. Accordingly, even if the noetic moment is dependent on the given, preexisting reality for the answer to the question it presupposes, the ontic moment as such is also dependent on the noetic moment as presupposing this, instead of some other question. Thus the experience of Jesus as of decisive significance for human existence is the experience of Jesus as the answer to the existential question by which the experience is oriented and, but for being implicitly, if not explicitly, oriented by which it could not have been the experience it is. In this sense, or to this extent, the ontic moment depends on the noetic moment as well as the other way around.

This mutual dependence is reflected, then, in the strict correlation of the primal authorizing source and the primary authority authorized by it.

It also explains the strict correlation -- indeed, interdependence -- of word and Spirit, or of our witness to Jesus Christ and the Spirit's witness to him (Jn. 15:26 f.).

26 June 1980; rev. 21 February 2000

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