The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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The question I want an answer to is, What are the absolutely minimal metaphysical presuppositions of "religion" in the strict or proper sense? 

In reflecting on this question, I have two things very much in mind. One is the clear and sharp distinction that Bultmann makes between Greek idealism, on the one hand, and both Hebrew-Jewish monotheism and Hellenistic mysticism (e.g., Neoplatonism), on the other hand. Whereas the latter are both, on Bultmann's analysis, "properly religious," Greek idealism is, in reality, "humanism" (or, as one could also say, perhaps, "naturalism"), and so is not "properly religion" at all. 

The other thing in my mind is Whitehead's identification of "the defect of the Greek analysis of generation" and the theory of the priority of relational predicates implied by grasping, as the Greek analysis failed to do, "the real operation of antecedent particulars imposing themselves on the novel particular in process of creation." Hartshorne expresses the theory of relational predicates by saying, "Subjects are what they are not through mere private predicates or properties, but through the references which it is in their natures to make to certain other subjects." 

With both of these things in mind, I incline to think that the minimal metaphysical presuppositions of "religion" in the strict and proper sense are the necessary applicability of the two disjunctive transcendentals, concrete-abstract and divine-nondivine. Necessarily, there are abstract things and concrete things; and there is a divine thing as well as nondivine things. But the divine thing neither is nor can be merely abstract, but must also be concrete (hence relative, contingent, dependent, changing, and so on). The difference, however, between the way in which the divine is concrete (hence relative, contingent, dependent, changing, and so on) and the way in which anything else is so is a transcendental (and so an analogous, rather than either a univocal or an equivocal) difference. 

29 September 2006

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