The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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  1. It is true that religion has a metaphysical aspect as well as an existential aspect—just as it is true that religion has a moral (including a specifically political) as well as an existential aspect.

  2. But it is a mistake to suppose that these different aspects are all of logically the same kind, as certainly seems to be implied, say, by Macquarrie's hyphenated phrase, "existential-ontological" The truth, on the contrary, is that the existential aspect is the concrete, inclusive aspect, while the metaphysical and moral aspects are abstract, included aspects.

  3. Correspondingly, although it is true that the metaphysical and moral aspects respectively imply the existential aspect even as it implies both of them, the implications are not exactly the same. Whereas the existential aspect implies the moral and the metaphysical aspects as necessary conditions of its own possibility, they in turn imply it only as a possibility, not as an actuality.

  4. Actually, the metaphysical is to the existential as the existentialist is to the existential. In fact, the metaphysical, broadly understood, includes the existentialist as an integral part of itself, along with the cosmological and the theological as well as the ontological. (This comparison is helpful, for, while "existentialist" and "existential" respectively designate different aspects, there is no reason to suppose that they are aspects of logically the same kind, as distinct from being aspects of logically different kinds.)

  5. Religious language is existential language, in that it talks about the meaning of ultimate reality for us. As such, it necessarily implies both metaphysical language, which talks about the structure of ultimate reality in itself, and moral language, which talks about our own responsibility, given the meaning of ultimate reality for us that is expressed primarily by religious language. 

3 May 1979; rev. 13 April 2001; 10 December 2008

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