By Schubert Ogden
The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden
H. R. Niebuhr distinguishes helpfully, if only more or less systematically, between the three spheres of knowledge, conduct, and worship.
On my understanding, however, and maybe also on Niebuhr's, these three spheres, though distinct, also importantly overlap. Thus, if knowledge is knowledge of reality, and if the object of worship is real, then one of the things we know in knowing reality is the object of worship, i.e., the worshipful, the unsurpassable, and so on.
Similarly, if it is true that certain forms of conduct are right, others wrong, then right and wrong are, in their way, real, and knowledge of them as real must be possible. In other words, there are (true) practical propositions as well as (true) theoretical propositions.
26 September 2008
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