By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
I note with some interest that, in my essay, "The Promise of Faith," I speak several times of the "structure and meaning" of our existence in order to designate the referent of eschatological (as well as protological) myths and symbols. Thus I speak, in different places, of "the abiding structure and meaning of our actual existence here and now" (210), "the essential structure and meaning of life as each of us immediately experiences them and as they are decisively understood and clarified by the witness of Christian faith" (211), and "the essential structure and meaning of our life in the present" (214).
Oddly, I don't speak of "meaning and structure," but of "structure and meaning." Also, in my earlier essay, "Myth and Truth," I speak, simply, of "the constant structure" of our experience, as distinct from its "variable details," by which I mean "our own existence as selves, as those who, whatever their external perceptions, always experience themselves and the world as finite-free parts of an infinite whole" (117).
12 May 2003
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