Herman Dooyeweerd: Humanism’s historicist swing from classical fixed values to a radical relativism

Plaque apposée au n° 36 de la rue Bonaparte, Paris 6e,
où habita le philosophe Auguste Comte (1798-1857) de 1818 à 1822.
(Crédits: Wiki)

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NOTES ON DOOYEWEERD'S USE OF THE TERM 
“RELIGION”

It is highly important not to misunderstand Dooyeweerd’s use of this ambiguous word, currently much-maligned in popular parlance. Dooyeweerd is not at all referring to what is commonly disparaged as “organized religion”. Very far from it. Rather, he is alluding to the concentration point or anchorage of every individual’s deepest selfhood, whether that individual be professedly pious, agnostic, humanist, or atheist. Dooyeweerd is denoting that which is an ontically core feature of the human being per se. He is talking about what for humans is a universal structural default, namely the restless search of the selfhood for an ultimate point of integration. In this light it might therefore be productive when reading Dooyeweerd to try mentally replacing the word "religious" with "ultimate", having the wider sense of being rooted in the real or imagined Origin of all consciousness and existence. (FMF)

Dooyeweerd writes -

“To the question, what is understood here by religion? I reply: the innate impulse of human selfhood to direct itself toward the true or toward a pretended absolute Origin of all temporal diversity of meaning, which it finds focused concentrically in itself. 

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Herman Dooyeweerd: 
Humanism’s historicist swing from classical fixed values to a radical relativism.

 (A short extract from Herman Dooyeweerd's essay 'Presuppositions of our Thought about Law and Society in the Crisis of Modern Historicism' in book ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’ , Paideia Press 2017)

HUMANIST DUALISTIC GROUND-MOTIVE:
Scientific Law / Free Personality
[...] Ever since the Renaissance, modern humanism has been driven by the proud freedom motive aimed at a new society, dialectically accompanied by the modern nature motive – ie the tendency to gain autonomous control of reality by means of modern science. Today, however, the humanist freedom motive has lost its vital power. Modern man, uprooted, finds his “autonomous freedom" only in the existential possibility to plan his future in a mood of “concern”, aware that this future ends ontologically in a “nothing”, in “death”. At the same time, the classical humanist science ideal as well, with its aim to establish the ideal realm of autonomous freedom through the “control of nature", has lost its spiritual foundation. For the spiritually uprooted descendants of the humanist pioneers the once highly valued “objective science” now has the significance of a mere artificial aid in an ultimately hopeless struggle for existence.

MODERN HISTORICISM 
Such is the philosophical self-reflection of modern historicism, which may well be designated as a full-blown revelation of the deadly disease of our Western culture. One finds it in Spengler’s The Decline of the West, in Heidegger’s Being and Time, and in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness – three representative works that follow the course of this self-reflection from the prelude to World War 1 to the spiritual climate after World War 2. [...] Modern uprooted historicism, which is no longer capable of rising above the historical time-aspect and which has lost its faith in an eternal destiny of humankind, is but a degenerate descendant of the “historical mode of thought” as it was born amid the still vibrant religious [ultimate] ground-motive of humanism during the late 18th and early 19th century as a polar reaction to the classical science ideal of the “Enlightenment” with its natural-scientific mode of thought.

COMTE
[…] When at the beginning of the 19th century sociology emerged as an independent discipline, its founders, Saint-Simon and Comte, explicitly intended to reconcile the natural-scientific mode of thought of the Enlightenment – the putative crowning discipline of the encyclopedic system of human knowledge – with the new historical mode of thought of Romanticism and freedom idealism. In this way sociology, from its very beginning, took over the historicist view of reality, which nonetheless, in line with the classical science ideal, had to be united with the natural-scientific method of thought.

Although Comte still acknowledged that the solidarity of the social organism finally rested upon ideas of community, these ideas in principle lost their supra-temporal significance in his positive system. The historicist mode of thought had already started to separate itself from its idealistic presuppositions by viewing them merely as products of a historical process of development of humanity’s spiritual life.

“LAW OF THREE STAGES”: 
Theological, Metaphysical, Positive
Comte’s famous law of three stages was one of the first attempts to historicize the guiding ideas of Western culture that owe their contents to religious [ultimate] ground-motives as central driving-forces. In this train of thought, the natural-law ideas of the previous era were viewed as an expression of the metaphysical stage, which denied the laws of social reality and accorded a role to speculative humanist jurists. This process had to come to an end in the chaos of the French Revolution. Similar to the earlier theological stage, the metaphysical era had passed for good. In future, positive ideas would govern the final phase of the history of humanity, submitting human society to the classical science ideal that had been worked out by Galileo and Newton for the natural sciences. 

ENLIGHTENMENT BELIEF
To be sure, the start of this process of historicizing [as opposed to being immutably above history] to the deepest presuppositions of thought about law and society was not consistently followed through in Comte. His thought was still in the grip of Enlightenment belief in an ideal final goal of world history, in the course of which, under the guidance of positivist ideas, the ideal of true Humanity would be fulfilled. That these ideas, too, would eventually lose their grip on society did not occur to Comte’s rigid mind. The positivist stage meant for him the eschatological terminus. He still held to the belief in progress.

EVOLUTIONISM 
The same can be said of evolutionism, which after Comte commenced its triumphal march in Western culture and took command of its thought about law and society. It stripped classical humanism of its metaphysical pretensions about a “free rational human nature" by reducing human spiritual life to a secondary function of the organic development of a conglomeration of cells. Nonetheless, evolutionism remains firmly rooted in the classical humanist science ideal which in turn is driven by the humanist ground-motive of the autonomous freedom of humankind.

MARX
Even historical materialism, with its historico-economistic view of social reality and its eschatological, utopian hope, in the final analysis remained rooted in the same ground-motive. Marx’s future differed widely from Spencer’s, yet Spencer, the evolutionistic preacher of the survival of the fittest and the one who praised the free play of societal forces, and Marx, the radical prophet of the decline of the capitalist system, shared a belief in a free and autonomous mankind as the final point of historical development. Anyone who believes in an ideal final goal for history always has a transcendent-religious basis for his scientific and practical pursuits.

The classical science ideal, as we have seen, oriented as it was to the natural-scientific mode of thought, remained in polar opposition to the classical freedom motive in its personality ideal. Similarly, the historicist mode of thought, elevated to a new science ideal, turned out to be a polar counterpart to the new universalist and irrationalist conception of humanism’s freedom motive.

“OBJECTIVE SCIENCE”
After the collapse of German idealism during the second half of the 19th century, faith in the absolute value of the human being was temporarily able to take shelter in “objective science” [ie science viewed as custodian of timeless truths]. Science had now also brought the historical reality of society within its purview and would, in its steady progress, lead mankind to ever higher levels of freedom and happiness.

Yet the historicist mode of thought harbors radical consequences in its theoretical view of reality which will assert themselves as soon as it starts to loosen its tie with its religious  [ultimate] root and commences to view its humanist presuppositions themselves as historically determined [therefore transient] products of the mind.

NIETZSCHE
At this point in time, thought about law and society became entangled in a process of spiritual uprooting in which either a mood of decline or a blind pursuit of power dominated. This process announced itself long before World War I, although the prevailing optimistic faith in the future of mankind precluded an explicit acknowledgement of it. As early as the final phase of Nietzsche’s thought it broke through in frightening, almost pathological form. According to him, man is “the animal whose nature has not yet been fixed” and who has no existential possibility outside nature and [the flux of] history. Nature has stamped man as an animal, but as a historical being man has an advantage in comparison with the other members of the animal world which are still rigidly bound to their instincts and their environment. The development of the human being is not fixed because man disposes over his own future. But the "historical aspect" of reality [= Dooyeweerd's "law-sphere" or "modality" of cultural-formative control] provides us, stripped of all ideologies of humanity and moral autonomy, with the development of power tendencies only. Thus historical development offers only one real possibility for the future: an unbridled striving towards an increase of power, not hampered by a single traditional norm.

DEMONIC RELIGION OF POWER: 
“transvaluation of all values”
The realm of the super-human Herrenmensch must [according to this line of thought] be erected upon the ruins of Christian and Humanist ideologies, upon the “transvaluation of all values”. In this demonic religion of power the control motive of the classic science ideal is utterly divorced from its spiritual root: namely, the Religion of Humanity as the absolute value of the human personality. In the pathological division of the humanist personality ideal which has lost its religious core [as absolute Origin of all meaning], it took on an anti-humane character. Combined with the irrationalist doctrine of the folk-spirit [Volksgeist], this uprooted power religion led to the ideal of the   Herrenvolk (the Master Race), eventually presented in the myth of Blood and Soil or in the myth of Eternal Rome.

LOSS OF FAITH IN ETERNAL IDEAS
Historicism, uprooted and delivered over to the demonic power religion [ie power absolutized as Origin of all meaning], has lost all faith in eternal ideas that give direction to historical development. In a neurotic attempt to yet find an inspiring motive for working for a future, a myth – if need be in the form of primitive notions extracted from the historical past – is used in mythological garb to serve as an incentive for the folk instincts.

This historicism no longer has any yardstick for differentiating between what is historically progressive and historically reactionary.

GERMANIST WING
[…] The perilous consequences of historicism surfaced in a much more dangerous form in the Germanist wing of the Historical School. This wing promoted the idea of the folk-spirit [Volksgeist], and against jurist law it posited the undifferentiated “social” conception of the Germanic folk-spirit as the ideal, in opposition to the reception of the “individualistic” Roman law.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM 
[…] Taking the historicist conception of the Germanic folk-spirit [Volksgeist] to its extreme reactionary consequences was reserved for national socialism. Historicism, uprooted from the humanist ground-motive [of the autonomous freedom of humankind], revived the primitive phenomenon of trustis [Footnote: Name of a group of free warriors who formed a king’s bodyguard and were personally bound to him by an oath of unquestioned loyalty] in old Germanic law in order to create a power center aided by the myth of a Führer and his following. In this movement, destroying an individual’s personhood and annihilating conquered peoples’ national consciousness went hand in hand with worshiping primitive folk [Volksgeist] customs and practices and repudiating the classic foundations of civil private law. Even in cases where this uprooted historicism did not lead to such a pathological cult of power, it operated like a process of subversion, undermining the foundations of the modern differentiated legal order.

(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 158,160-164)

Free direct PDF DOWNLOAD (482 pages) of above book. 
HOMEPAGE for other free Dooyeweerd book downloads. 
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See also:

DOOYEWEERD: We have witnessed the unspeakably bloody and reactionary regime of nazism….

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Dooyeweerd: From Idealism to Historicism: Marxism as Messianic Faith

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Dooyeweerd: The Criteria of Progressive and Reactionary Tendencies in History

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Dooyeweerd: Reactionary & Progessive National Norms (Scottish State? Gaelic Resurgence? British Values?)

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Dooyeweerd: Disclosure of an Apostate Culture: The Enlightenment

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Dooyeweerd: The Wielding of Power

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Dooyeweerd: If I drank a cup of coffee yesterday and smoked a cigar...
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Abortion: Some related remarks by Dooyeweerdian thinker Andree Troost (1916-2008)

Abortion: Some related remarks by Dooyeweerdian thinker Andree Troost (1916-2008)

Being extracts from: ‘WHAT IS REFORMATIONAL PHILOSOPHY? An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of HERMAN DOOYEWEERD’ (Paideia Press 2012)

The 15 IRREDUCIBLE EXPERIENTIAL 

LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) 

9.2.4 Physical Time
According to the experts, time in the physical aspect [or "experiential law-sphere" - see above chart] manifests itself as non-reversibility in succession. This is shown by the sequential order of cause and effect. In everyday life physical time is primarily objectified in clock time and also in calendar dates — in “day and hour”.

9.2.5 Organic Time
In this aspect [law-sphere], (universal or total) time is expressed in the progression of the life process.

a) The organic process is characterized by development and decline, in the progression of germination, growth, maturation, ageing and dying. Physical irreversibility is here enhanced by finality, that is, goal-orientation, purpose.

b) The phases in organic processes, as in historical processes (see below), cannot be demarcated from each other mathematically (that is, quantitatively) by means of clock-time units such as years. Our internal biological clock is not synchronous with our watch.

Thus it is impossible to indicate the exact moment when a person or animal comes into being in the process of generation, or when death has set in. This requires biological and psychological criteria; but even these can only mark certain aspects of corporeal death or corporeal life. In the case of human beings, moreover, clerks at the Records Office will apply a juridical [aspect/ law-sphere] criterion when they ask for a doctor’s certificate. 

Man, as we will see in the next chapter, is not exhausted by his temporal mode of existence. That is also the reason why the (wrongly formulated) problem of the exact time of human generation and death finds its answer outside the area accessible to scientific analysis.

This fact is not important in the first place for the juridical problem of abortion and euthanasia (in the end-of-life phase), or for the medical problem of the criterion for terminating life (for the purpose, say, of organ transplants), but it is especially important for the moral and religious questions that arise here.

c) Full humanity comprises more than a person’s lifetime, that is to say, more than its beginning and its end in time. Therefore it cannot be delimited or measured by any aspectual [experiential law-sphere] criterion. We have long known this in faith, indeed we find it quite normal: we have no problem confessing that “temporal or physical death” is not the end of our existence.

Theology’s crutch here was always the pagan doctrine of an “immortal soul”. In practice this tool for use in apologetics usually leads to a materialistic view of the beginning and end of our temporal human existence. Both are then pinned down to an organic [aspect/ law-sphere] moment in time (the fusion of egg cell and sperm cell at conception, implantation in the uterine wall, to an exact moment for establishing cardiac arrest or brain death). In turn this often causes people to wrongly introduce the term “murder”. In the end, the way people think and talk about these issues is governed by how they view man’s heart, life’s transience, and the relation between them.

Here, too, ‘ethics’ is based on a theoretical view of reality (and in this context: on an anthropology) which is philosophical in character. The question at which point in time an organically qualified ["organically qualified" = context in which the organic aspect is the leading experiential law-sphere] fetus has become or will become a human being cannot be answered scientifically. Any answer one might give depends on a subjective religious interpretation of the observable facts in a concrete case. But the grounds for this belief, erroneous or not, can never be found in theoretical hypotheses about organic facts, the more so when these facts can only be established scientifically and with sophisticated medical technology. Every real belief (or “unbelief”) is based on man’s reception and interpretation of divine revelation. (pp 152, 153)

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9.2.13 Juridical Time
The meaning of retribution gives an entirely distinctive mode of expression to time in the juridical aspect [experiential law-sphere].

a) Certain rights can be forfeited through lapse of time and “superannuate”, losing their validity. The term of a prison sentence cannot be prescribed in law in terms of a fixed number of months and years. The term is a punishment, which is a juridical figure. To be a just punishment, a judge (as a living and deliberating person) must determine its length in each individual case in a balancing consideration of guilt and punishment, allowing for, say, an offender’s psychological state, his age, background or culture. Hence criminal laws always mention a maximum sentence, which is no more than an upper limit for the judge.

Government laws do not acquire force of law until the time they are published in the official gazette, unless they take effect retroactively from a specified earlier time. All these are juridical figures of time, which cannot be identified with their moral aspect, their social or religious aspect.

b) When does a human person actually come into being? The juridical time in question here can be laid down in statute law as a criterion for making abortion punishable or non-punishable, for instance after the first trimester. Similarly, according to the biotic aspect of temporal human generation, the beginning of organic corporeality can be hypothetically assumed and legally laid down as the moment when sperm and ovum unite.

In both instances we are dealing with no more than one particular (in this case juridical) temporal aspect [experiential law-sphere] of human life, and not with full humanity itself. A full human being does not have a moment in time when it comes “into being “. Everybody knows that the date and hour of birth are not this moment either. Complete man has a genesis only in the sense of a (supra-temporal) origin, namely in God’s creation. Here, Christ (God and man) was created as the first creature (the “alpha”); and created with him, because “in Christ”, was man, the first Adam, as was the rest of creation (Col 1:15,16 - “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation... all things have been created through him and for him”). This “origin” should not be interpreted as a “starting-point” in time. (pp 157, 158)

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10.2.3.1-1 Human identity and its interlacement in temporal reality 
Man’s relation to his own body involves at the same time his relation to the so-called material world around him. It is with his organic corporeality that man is interwoven with this world, encapsulated, or to use a Dooyeweerdian term, “enkaptically interlaced”.

To an important degree the same natural laws apply to minerals, plants, animals and human bodies. But man alone relates all these so-called material phenomena also subjectively to his I-ness. He experiences these “material” phenomena as something of himself. It is he himself who manifests himself in these aspects and entities of the temporal cosmos. As a result, man feels and experiences a many-sided participation in the world around him, in which he lives and feels at home. And yet he is equally aware of his own uniqueness and identity in this world, as is already suggested, for instance, by his footprints or fingerprints.

It would be foolish to say, however, that the personal identity and uniqueness of a human being reside in his fingertips, or in any part of his body for that matter. It is the unintentional effect of an uprooted and materialist view of man that induces a writer to say that a Christian need not object to organ transplants except for the transplanting (if possible) of a brain or genitalia. This is essentially a horizontalist view of man that seeks man’s uniqueness and identity somewhere in certain organs within his temporal corporeality.

10.2.3.1-2 The birth of a human being is not his origin
The same deficient anthropology is found in the view that the fusion of an egg cell with a sperm cell produces not just a human organ, but a new human being. This leads, by logical inference, to the well-known and over-simplified proposition “abortion is murder”. But the origin of a human being, his fullness and uniqueness and thus his totality, cannot be scientifically established or bio-technically grasped. That would betray a positivist-rationalist attitude of thought. The origin of a human being is not the same as his beginning in time.

Human origin remains a religious mystery, and we should not presume to pass a (“scientifically reliable”) judgement on the “point in time” (??) when a human person comes into full being. For the origin of a person does not lie in time, unlike the origin (in the sense of “beginning “) of the human body. The origin of the total human being transcends all temporal knowledge, understanding and control, just as it transcends his corporeality as a whole, including all the “genes”. Man’s origin resides in his (scientifically inaccessible) supra-temporal and thus supra-corporeal center, in his “heart”: in his createdness, in Christ as the alpha, the beginning. And no different is the end of man’s temporal mode of existence: it is a given already now, in Christ, the alpha and the omega.

10.2.3.1-3 The juridical and moral aspect of a human birth 
However, what we can do for the situation of a birth or impending birth in our temporal mode of existence is to formulate juridical and moral agreements or enact laws in human society, and in this way construct a practical normativity. In part this is even mandatory, given the brokenness of life and the many possibilities of ethical lapses.

But any argument one might wish to mount in these cases will have to respect the mystery of the point in question and will therefore have to refrain in our legal system from restricting or enlarging, on religious grounds, freedom of belief and freedom of choice. Rules can only be drawn up for the various sectors of the public sphere on public-moral and juridical grounds, but these rules should not presume to represent the whole will of God for the private spheres of marriage or family life. (pp 178-180)

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13.5.4 Rigidity and dynamism 
[…] The sixth commandment prohibits “murder”, as the Heidelberg Catechism teaches so well in Lord’s Day 40, Question 105 (“What is God’s will for us in the sixth commandment? Answer: I am not to belittle, insult, hate, or kill my neighbor — not by my thoughts, my words, my look or gesture, and certainly not by actual deeds...”). The sixth commandment is not a legal prohibition, but a moral prohibition and commandment. The simplistic slogan “abortion is murder” is therefore to be rejected as a formalistic superficiality. Abortion can be murder, but it is not always so. The same can be said of euthanasia. In anthropological terms we can put it like this: external actions should not be divorced from their internal depth layers of dispositions and ethos. That would be a primitive externalization and lead to a juridification and rationalization of morality [ie to an infringement of the “sphere-sovereignty” of the ethical law-sphere by its reduction to the juridical and logical law-spheres]. That is the opposite of disclosure [ie of the optimum historical opening-process of the law-spheres upwards]: an ossification of both law and morality in the form of logical definitions, formal application of laws, and frozen traditions. (p 276)

Above extracts are from: 

‘WHAT IS REFORMATIONAL PHILOSOPHY? An Introduction to the Cosmonomic Philosophy of HERMAN DOOYEWEERD’ by Andree TROOST (Paideia Press 2012)

Translated by Anthony RUNIA, from original 2005 volume: Antropocentrische Totaliteitswetenschap: Inleiding in de 'reformatorische wijsbegeerte' van H. Dooyeweerd
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Temas Criticos: God, Meaning, Work.

Increase Meaning Course Lectures | Ajoutée le 10 août 2017

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Herman Dooyeweerd writes:

The Christian as a stranger in this world.

Although the fallen earthly cosmos is only a sad shadow of God's original creation, and although the Christian can only consider  himself as a stranger and a pilgrim in this world, yet he cannot recognize the true creaturely ground of meaning in the apostate root of this cosmos, but only in the new root, Christ. Any other view would inevitably result in elevating sin to the rank of an independent counter-power opposed to the creative power of God. And this would result in avoidance of the world, an unbiblical flight from the world. We have nothing to avoid in the world but sin. The war that the Christian wages in God's power in this temporal life against the Kingdom of darkness, is a joyful struggle, not only for his own salvation, but for God's creation as a whole, which we do not hate, but love for Christ's sake. We must not hate anything in the world but sin.

The apostate world cannot maintain any meaning as its own property in opposition to Christ. Common Grace.

Nothing in our apostate world can get lost in Christ. There is not any part of space, there is no temporal life, no temporal movement or temporal energy, no temporal power, wisdom, beauty, love, faith or justice, which sinful reality can maintain as a kind of property of its own apart from Christ.

     Whoever relinquishes the 'world' taken in the sense of sin, of the 'flesh' in its Scriptural meaning, does not really lose anything of the creaturely meaning, but on the contrary he gets a share in the fulness of meaning of Christ, in Whom God will give us everything. It is all due to God's common grace in Christ that there are still means left in the temporal world to resist the destructive force of the elements that have got loose; that there are still means to combat disease, to check psychological maladies, to practise logical thinking, to save cultural development from going down into savage barbarism, to develop language, to preserve the possibility of social intercourse, to withstand injustice, and so on. All these things are the fruits of Christ's work, even before His appearance on the earth. From the very beginning God has viewed His fallen creation in the light of the Redeemer.

(Herman Dooyeweerd, A New Critique of Theoretical Thought. Vol II, p 32-36)

More at:

Dooyeweerd: Kant, Fichte, Husserl, Hofmann 

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Dooyeweerd: 'This tree in front of my house' - Individuality structures, modal aspects, substance.

Photo: F. MacFhionnlaigh

The 15 IRREDUCIBLE LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) 

Dooyeweerd: 

'This tree in front of my house' 

- Individuality structures, 

modal aspects, substance. 

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’

The individuality structures of reality, unlike the modal structures, do not relate to the how or the mode of being, but to the concrete what of reality.

As we noted earlier, individuality structures are time-structures of individual totalities such as things, concrete events or acts, societal forms (family, state, church, business enterprise), and so on.

[…] A concrete entity, such as this tree in front of my house, is more than the sum of its modal functions of number, space, movement, organic life, and so on. Before all else it is a temporal individual whole with a relative persistence that lies at the basis of all its modal functions. Traditional metaphysics used to speak in this context of a substance.

The Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea distanced itself on principle from the philosophical substance concept, and it did so on solid grounds.

The substance concept was meant to account for an undeniable given of naive [routine] experience, namely the relative endurance or persistence of an entity in spite of the exchange of its parts and its sensorially perceptible shapes and properties. Given its substance concept, however, metaphysics, misled by the immanence standpoint, in principle detached itself from what is actually given in naive [routine] experience and set out to find an abstract “essence” of things, supposedly accessible only to theoretical thought. In this way metaphysics arrived at its theoretical construction of a “substance “ as a self-contained “thing-in-itself”, which is then opposed by the subjective perception and apperception of human consciousness.

Although it does allow for the most diverse conceptions depending on further theoretical specifications of the immanence standpoint, the metaphysical substance concept in all its forms was therefore nothing but the absolutization of a theoretical abstraction. It was always predicated on the elimination of the cosmic horizon of time and a theoretical breaking apart of reality into a noumenon and a phenomenon.

The “thing-in-itself”, in whatever way it is conceived, is nothing but a theoretical abstraction from temporal reality which is reified into an independent substance.

[…] What then constitutes the basic difference between the individuality structures of temporal reality? Without a doubt it is found in the typical totality character of these structures. Ultimately this character remains inaccessible to scientific analysis, for the same reason that cosmic time in its continuity cannot be theoretically analyzed. The inner nature of an individual totality simply impinges itself upon our experience. The moment one attempts to enter into a theoretical analysis of such a totality one is dependent upon the modal aspects in which that totality functions but which can never exhaust its existence. In this analysis, the totality, just like cosmic time, remains that which is presupposed. In its totality it precedes theoretical analysis and one can never afterwards construct it from "elements".

A few examples of aspectual (law-sphere) structures, showing each nucleus with retrocipatory and anticipatory analogies. The irreducible nucleus reflects the aspect's sphere-sovereignty. The analogies (to all fourteen remaining aspects) reflect each aspect's sphere-universality. As aspects of cosmic time the law-spheres manifest a fixed order, as is the case with the prismatic spectrum of refracted colours.
(Illustrations: FMF)

[…] What is striking in the first place is that the modal functions within an individuality structure are grouped in a typical way. This grouping does not affect the cosmic time-order of the aspects as such as we have discussed them earlier; this order maintains itself also within an individuality structure of reality. The latter structure also does not affect the modal irreducibility or sphere-sovereignty of the aspects. Also within the individuality structure of, say, a tree, the modal numerical function [law-sphere] is irreducible to the spatial function [law-sphere] and the movement function [law-sphere]. It is not possible to reduce any one of these three functions in a so-called “holistic” sense to mere modalities of the organic function [law-sphere] of life or to the (objective) psychical function [sensory law-sphere] of an entity.

However, when our theoretical analysis follows the cosmic time-order of the modal aspects [law-spheres] within the inner structure of the tree it strikes us that only with the biotic aspect [law-sphere] does it become meaningful to speak of this entity as a tree, and at the same time that the organic aspect [law-sphere] of life is the last modal aspect [law-sphere] in which the tree still functions as a subject. In all later aspects [law-spheres] it does not have subject-functions but only modal object-functions. 

The organic function of life [biotic law-sphere] is the typical destinational function [law-sphere] or the qualifying function [law-sphere] of the internal tree-structure. This qualifying function [law-sphere] within the individuality structure also unlocks or discloses its earlier modal functions [law-spheres] in the anticipatory direction towards its typical biotical destination. This enables us to detect within the aspect of movement internally directed motions, such as those of the metabolic and growth movements (which are different from the external motions of a tree, for example when it is struck by a gust of wind).

Yet this does not transform these internal movements into something intrinsically biotical. They merely deepened their biotic anticipations under the typical guidance of the qualifying function [law-sphere] of the tree.

It is the individuality structure of the tree and not the time-order of the modal aspects [law-spheres] which guarantees this typical grouping of the modal functions [law-spheres] within an individual whole.

The individuality structure is a typical structure of cosmic time. When the subjective biotic function [law-sphere] of the tree is harmed it can no longer exist as an individual whole. Yet it cannot be said that this biotic function is the essence of the tree, because the modal biotic function [law-sphere] does not constitute the totality principle of the tree. The opposite is much rather the case: the totality character determines that the biotic function is the directing and guiding function [law-sphere] of all the other functions [law-spheres]. 

In other words, the totality itself does have a modal [law-sphere] character but equally embraces all aspects [law-spheres] of the tree in their typical grouping. If any one of these aspects [law-spheres] were lacking, the tree would cease to exist as a tree. The individuality structure also fully accounts for the relatively persistent character of the tree as its parts and sensory [law-sphere] properties are replaced.

While functioning in its typical individuality structure the tree remains identical to itself. Loss of this structure, for example when it is felled and sawn into boards, will give rise to a number of other entities with radically different structures.

(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 89-94)

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What Makes a Nation Christian? (Jonathan Chaplin, 2011)

Jonathan Chaplin 

What Makes a Nation Christian?

Wheaton College | March 21, 2011

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Lawyers Christian Fellowship Ethics Lecture:

"Talking God:  
A Christian Voice in a Secular Society?" 

Jonathan Chaplin

speaking at Buccleugh and Greyfriars Free Church of Scotland, Edinburgh, 2nd February 2013.

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SEE ALSO (pamphlet):

"Talking God: 

The Legitimacy of Religious Public Reasoning"

by Jonathan Chaplin 

(Director of The Kirby Laing Institute For Christian Ethics - KLICE)

Highly recommended reading for anyone concerned with presenting Christian views in political or public forums. Very relevant to current Scottish context.

PDF Download (free)

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SEE ALSO (following online article HERE):

Living with Liberalism: 
understanding regimes of tolerance

How tolerant is liberal toleration? Jonathan Chaplin drills down into the practice of liberalism's doctrine of toleration, and its implications for the public square, especially in the university. Dr. Chaplin is a leading neocalvinist political scholar. (December 22, 2006)

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SEE ALSO (book):

Herman Dooyeweerd:

Christian Philosopher of State and Civil Society

by Jonathan Chaplin (Published 2011)

$68.00/ £56.58

"The twentieth-century Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd (1894–1977) left behind an impressive canon of philosophical works and has continued to influence a scholarly community in Europe and North America, which has extended, critiqued, and applied his thought in many academic fields. Jonathan Chaplin introduces Dooyeweerd for the first time to many English readers by critically expounding Dooyeweerd’s social and political thought and by exhibiting its pertinence to contemporary civil society debates. Chaplin begins by contextualizing Dooyeweerd’s thought, first in relation to present-day debates and then in relation to the work of the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920). Chaplin outlines the distinctive theory of historical and cultural development that serves as an essential backdrop to Dooyeweerd’s substantive social philosophy; examines Dooyeweerd’s notion of societal structural principles; and sets forth his complex classification of particular types of social structure and their various interrelationships. Chaplin provides a detailed examination of Dooyeweerd’s theory of the state, its definitive nature, and its proper role vis-à-vis other elements of society. Dooyeweerd’s contributions, Chaplin concludes, assist us in mapping the ways in which state and civil society should be related to achieve justice and the public good."

Table of Contents (free pdf)

Intro & Chap 1 (free pdf)

PROJECT MUSE pdf downloads of entire book 

(Shibboleth institutional authentication required)

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SEE ALSO:

The Kirby Laing Institute for Christian Ethics (KLICE)

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Dooyeweerd: Prismatic time-order of refracted aspects

The 15 IRREDUCIBLE LAW-SPHERES of COSMIC TIME 

(Also called Aspects/ Modes/ Modalities/ Meaning-sides) 

Dooyeweerd: Prismatic time-order of refracted aspects

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’

As horizon of the modal aspect structures the order of time truly is a law of refraction. The meaning-totality of our temporal cosmos, which constitutes the essential unity and fullness of the meaning of all aspects of creation, cannot be given within time. It has a transcendent, supra-temporal character.

This applies to both the law-side and the subject-side of reality. 

According to its religious fullness and meaning-totality, the law of God is one and indivisible: the demand to serve God whole-heartedly. According to the religious fullness and meaning-totality of the subject-side of reality, the temporal creation, since the fall, is completely concentrated in the religious root-community of the new humanity in Christ. However, within time this religious fullness according to its law-side and subject-side is refracted into the modal aspects in which the wisdom of God’s plan for creation unfolds in a rich diversity of modal ordinances and subject-functions. Just as unbroken sunlight is refracted through a prism into the multicoloured richness of the spectrum, so the religious fullness of meaning of creation is refracted in the wealth of modal aspects which do not find their transcendent root-unity within time itself.

In its general theory of the modal aspects the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea has shown, by means of theoretical analysis, that the modal-aspect structures essentially are time-structures.

As we have seen, cosmic time, which in its continuity embraces and and overarches all modal aspects, refuses to be theoretically analysed, because it is a transcendental pre-supposition of theoretical analysis. Therefore, the only access open to the philosophical investigation of the cosmic time-order is by way of analysing the modal structures of time. Within the transcendental ground-idea of philosophy, cosmic time itself serves as philosophy's basic presupposition.

This ground-idea (or cosmonomic idea) is a foundational limiting concept of philosophy. Through it, philosophical thought, in the process of critical self-reflection, gives an account of its own necessary presuppositions which are themselves non-theoretical in nature and which make possible philosophical investigation to begin with. This basis idea contains, in addition to an idea about the origin and deeper unity of the modal aspects of temporal reality, also an idea about the interrelation or coherence of these aspects.

It is striking that these three transcendental ideas, which in their internal linkage are comprehended in any cosmonomic idea, lie at the foundation of every philosophical system, whether a thinker shows a critical awareness of it or not. Yet the immanence standpoint cannot concede that one's philosophical ground-idea is determined by non-theoretical presuppositions.

(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 73-75)

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NOTES ON DOOYEWEERD'S USE OF THE TERM “RELIGION”

It is highly important not to misunderstand Dooyeweerd’s use of this ambiguous word, currently much-maligned in popular parlance. Dooyeweerd is not at all referring to what is commonly disparaged as “organized religion”. Very far from it. Rather, he is alluding to the concentration point or anchorage of every individual’s deepest selfhood, whether that individual be professedly pious, agnostic, humanist, or atheist. Dooyeweerd is denoting that which is an ontically core feature of the human being per se. He is talking about what for humans is a universal structural default, namely the restless search of the selfhood for an ultimate point of integration. In this light it might therefore be productive when reading Dooyeweerd to try mentally replacing the word "religious" with "ultimate". (FMF)

Dooyeweerd writes -

“To the question, what is understood here by religion? I reply: the innate impulse of human selfhood to direct itself toward the true or toward a pretended absolute Origin of all temporal diversity of meaning, which it finds focused concentrically in itself. 

[...] There is one thing, however, on which we cannot lay too much stress. As the absolutely central sphere of human existence, religion transcends all modal aspects of temporal reality, the aspect of faith included.

[...] For we have seen that the faith-function [pistical law-sphere] is bound to cosmic time and to the temporal coherence of meaning with the other modal functions of our existence. It should not be identified with the religious centre of this latter. 

[...] Therefore, with respect to its inner essence, religion can never be described 'phenomenologically'. It is no 'psychological phenomenon', it is no emotional feeling-perception; it is not to be characterised, as is done by Rudolph Otto, as experience of the 'tremendum'. It is the ex-sistent condition in which the ego is bound to its true or pretended firm ground. Hence, the mode of being of the ego itself is of a religious character and is nothing in itself. Veritable religion is absolute self-surrender. The apostate person who supposes that their selfhood is something in itself, loses their self in the surrender to idols, in the absolutising of the relative.

[..] After having given an account of what we understand by religion, we can establish the fact that the concentric direction in theoretical thought must be of religious origin. It must be of a religious origin, even though it always remains theoretical in character, because of its being bound to the antithetic gegenstand-relation. It springs from the tendency to the origin in the centre of human existence, which tendency we previously discovered in the Introduction. But now we have made clear the inner point of contact between philosophic thought and religion from the intrinsic structure of the theoretical attitude of thought itself. Critical self-reflection in the concentric direction of theoretical thought to the ego necessarily appeals to self-knowledge (which goes beyond the limits of the theoretical gegenstand-relation). Consequently we may establish the fact that even the theoretical synthesis supposes a religious starting-point. Furthermore, we have now explained that it is meaningless to ask for a theoretical proof of its religious character, because such a proof presupposes the central starting-point of theoretical thought."

(Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘New Critique of Theoretical Thought’ Vol 1: ‘The Necessary Presuppositions of Philosophy’, pp 57-59)

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