Dooyeweerd: The modal aspects of time and their cosmic continuity.
Short extract from book
‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’
Temporal reality functions in a diversity of modal aspects which themselves are not subject to change in time but instead form a constant and basic modal framework within which the individual changeable entities, events, acts, deeds and societal relationships display their variable functions. The modal aspects make possible this variable functioning.
The modal structure does not exhibit the concrete what that is typical of individuality structures, since it reveals the how of reality. Each modal aspect is a functional way of being, a modality or a modal aspect of reality.
In the general theory of modal aspects the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea provisionally brought to light fourteen [subsequently fifteen (FMF)] such modal aspects of temporal reality. According to their law-like structure they are designated as law-spheres. They are that of:
1) quantity [numerical],
2) spatiality,
3) the aspect of movement [kinematic],
4) [the physical energy aspect,]
5) the biotic aspect,
6) the feeling (psychical) [sensory] aspect,
7) the analytical (or logical) aspect,
8) the historical [cultural, formative power] aspect,
9) the aspect of symbolical signification [lingual],
10) that of social interaction,
11) the economic,
12) the aesthetic,
13) the jural,
14) the moral [ethical]
15) and the faith [pistical/ certitudinal] aspect.
In theoretical-philosophical analysis these modalities are essentially set apart in a theoretical discontinuity. However, within temporal reality they are fitted into a continuous cosmic coherence and, as we shall see, this cosmic coherence is a temporal coherence.
As modal aspects of temporal reality they are implicitly modal time-aspects. In other words, within each modality of reality time comes to expression in a distinctive way without being exhausted by any one of them. The modal structure of reality itself is enclosed within cosmic time.
[...] The truth is that all so-called definitions of time are merely definitions of modal aspects of time, where time itself constantly remains the indefinable presupposition.
Extract from: Herman Dooyeweerd, ‘Time, Law, and History: Selected Essays’, Collected Works, Series B - Volume 14, Paideia Press 2017, pp 50-51 & 53. (£10, $12.95)
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