The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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It's worth remembering that I have more than once concluded—in connection with asking for the cash value of "substantive agreement"—that there are and must be different senses in which, or levels at which, there can be such agreement, depending on what is taken to be the "substance" in question. Thus, for example, Zen Buddhism and Protestant Christianity may be said to agree formally, if not substantively, in their respective analyses of the human predicament—and, possibly, to agree even substantively in their respective understandings of human existence, notwithstanding their significant lack of substantive agreement about what is to count as the explicit primal source of existential authority. 

Perhaps another thing worth keeping in mind is that basic faith in the meaning of life is, in a sense, or at a "basic" level, as "substantive" as a specific religious or philosophical faith is, in its own sense, or at its own less basic, more specific level—even though, when compared with such a more specific faith, basic faith is, relatively, "formal," rather than "substantive." 

Moreover, I am one who has argued that the most basic use of the concept/term "God" is to designate the objective ground in reality itself of our basic faith in the meaning of life—even as I have also clearly implied, whether or not I have ever explicitly argued, that "God" may be used broadly—in a metaphysical as distinct from an existential context-—to refer to strictly ultimate reality in its structure in itself. In fact, this is just how the concept/term is properly used by any metaphysical theology, as distinct both from any philosophical theology and any theology in the generic-specific sense. 

Finally, there would appear to be some relevance to all the above of the necessary distinction between "strata of meaning" in religious language, or between "religious language," properly so-called, on the one hand, and the "metaphysical language" necessary to formulate its necessary presuppositions and implications, on the other.

10 June 2009

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