The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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I've been clear for some time that the distinction I've made between the first "analytic" phase or aspect of philosophy and its second, "critico-constructive" phase or aspect simply won't do. But why I should have been so long in clearly recognizing the wanted alternative is, to say the least, disconcerting. Already in my essay on Hartshorne's theory of analogy, I had expressed my full agreement with him that "philosophy has 'two primary responsibilities,' only one of which is properly metaphysical, the other being rather practical or existentia1" (DTT: 208). 

So the obvious alternative is to speak of the two phases or aspects of philosophy simply as "analytic" and "existential" respectively. Philosophy's being "analytic" is its way of being "intellectual," or "scientific" (perhaps better: "scient" or "sciential"), while its being "existential" is its way of being—yes, "existential" (= "sapiential" or, possibly, "sapient"). In other words, its second phase or aspect is relatively more concrete, inclusive, whereas its first is relatively more abstract, included. 

If at the center of its first, analytic phase or aspect are transcendental metaphysics (in a broad sense) and the transcendental ethics determined thereby, it is the latter that is directly foundational for philosophy's second, existential phase or aspect. Transcendental metaphysics, in a strict sense, has to do with the structure of being in itself, and, in a broad sense, also with the structure of being that understands (or "existence" in the emphatic sense of the word) in itself. Transcendental ethics, on the other hand, has to do with the meaning of being and existence for us, although only with the essential structure of this meaning, and thus with the authentic self-understanding/ understanding of existence that being and existence, in their structure in itself, authorize. 

9 September 2005; rev. 21 June 2008; 17 October 2009

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