The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I wonder whether the relation between the ontic and noetic aspects of an explicit source of authority may not be something like that between God and the world, in that it is at once symmetrical and, more fundamentally, asymmetrical.

Although the ontic and noetic aspects of such a source are rightly said to be interdependent, because each necessarily implies the other, the ontic aspect necessarily implies and so is dependent on only some noetic aspect (even if one presupposing one basic question rather than any other), whereas the noetic aspect necessarily implies and thus depends on just the ontic aspect, i.e., the one and only ontic aspect by which it itself is authorized. Thus the relation between the two aspects, however symmetrical in one respect, is more fundamentally asymmetrical in another, because its ontic aspect is its authorizing aspect, its noetic aspect, its authorized aspect.

One may also explain their asymmetry by saying that, although each aspect is, in its way, both authorizing and authorized, the way in which it is either is distinctively different depending on whether the explicit source of authority of which it an aspect is primal, primary, or secondary.

19 December 2003

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