Dooyeweerd: Historical Aspect discloses formative anti-reactionary task. But tradition retains a role.

Dooyeweerd: Historical Aspect discloses formative anti-reactionary task. But tradition retains a role.

Short extract from book 

‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’

In the historical aspect time reveals itself in the modal sense of historical development. (Footnote: According to its subject-side “culture” is “formative control”). Historical “periods” are periods in the execution of the human task of formation and control. They are not mathematically demarcated from each other; the vital cultural factors of an earlier period are absorbed into those of the later cultural period. It is in tradition that historical developmental time fuses past, present and future. This time-order bears, similar to those present in all the subsequent aspects to be discussed, a modal normative character. It imposes on humankind a normative task to be culturally formative: it confronts the inertia of resting in the present or vegetating on the past with the demands of the future. A reaction in history is an anti-normative reaching back to a dead past; in a reactionary way it positions itself against the norm of historical development.

Extract from: Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 58 (£10.00, $12.95)

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