The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

SCANNED PDF

Let philosophy be understood as critical reflection on self-understanding, and thus on ultimate reality, which is to say, the necessary conditions of the possibility not only of human existence but also of being as such.

There should be no mystery, then about philosophy's being, in its first purely formal aspect, analysis of presuppositions überhaupt—i.e., of the necessary conditions of the possibility of all the various forms of life-praxis and culture (this being the task of all the peripheral philosophical disciplines, the so-called philosophies of . . .) as well as of the necessary conditions of the possibility of human existence and of being as such (this being the task of the central philosophical disciplines of transcendental metaphysics, including existentialist analysis, and transcendental ethics).

In all such analysis of presuppositions, philosophy remains oriented by the existential question, and thus is finally concerned with the meaning of ultimate reality for us, and so what it means to engage both in the various "directed activities of mankind" (Whitehead) and in existing as such, and how one ought to do so, i.e., how one ought to understand oneself and lead one's life. For this reason, philosophy not only has a first, analytic aspect, but also a second, existential aspect, in which it seeks its own critically reflective answer to the existential question of the ultimate meaning of human existence.

6 October 2000; rev. 31 May 2009

  • No labels