The Notebooks of Schubert Ogden

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  1. Human existence is the actualization somehow, in some actual state and in some mode of actualization, authentic or inauthentic, of the human essence.

  2. The human essence is to exist, not in the ordinary sense of simply being somehow actualized, but in the emphatic sense of somehow understanding one's existence.

  3. Therefore, human existence as the actualization somehow, in some actual state and in some mode of actualization, of existence in this emphatic sense is always actualized by the event of self-understanding. We exist humanly in the event of somehow understanding ourselves and therewith also understanding the ultimate whole of reality of which we are each a self-understanding part.

  4. In this sense, self-understanding is the, constitutive event of human existence, the event that constitutes the human existent as such and that never fails to occur as soon and as long as there is any distinctively human existence at all.

  5. Because this is so, one may say that, in one sense of the word "revelation," which may be distinguished as "original revelation," self-understanding as the constitutive event of human existence is itself the event of revelation, i.e., the disclosure of the ultimate whole of reality in its meaning for us, and thus as authorizing—entitling and empowering—our authentic self-understanding.

  6. In this sense, revelation is not, and cannot be, simply one event among others, but is the unique event which, being constitutive of human existence, has always already occurred as soon and as long as there is any human existence at all. It is the event in which the ever-new act of the ultimate whole of reality is somehow responded to understandingly by the ever-new act of faith or of unfaith.

  7. This is why neither faith nor unfaith, neither authentic faith nor inauthentic faith, is the development of a human capacity that may be developed more or less fully; for neither mode of self-actualization is possible at all but for the prevenient action of the ultimate whole of reality, and neither ever becomes actual except as the unique event of self-understanding-as one's ever-new response here and now in the moment to the ultimate whole's ever-new act of authorizing one's authentic existence.

1978; rev. 22 August 2003

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